Yes, I think it behooves anyone who writes publicly to use spelling- and grammar-checking tools, if only to catch the witless typos and other errors we’re all prone to, no matter our language proficiency.
Ironically, though, to utilize these tools most effectively, you almost have to be a grammarian or language expert to be confident enough to occasionally reject their suggestions. For example, if you write “twice as long as,” Word’s grammar checker suggests replacing “as long as” with “if,” reducing the sentence to nonsense. And everyone has seen inappropriate spelling suggestions (like the joke: A priest, a minister and a rabbit walk in to a bar. The bartender wonders: “A rabbit?” The rabbit shrugs: “Auto-correct.”).
In Dick’s book, androids (called replicants in the movie) are short on empathy, but they do appear to have good language proficiency. For some reason I’m kind of indifferent to the idea of robots writing, say, free verse poetry. There’s an enormous surplus of poetry being written now. Not sure a little more would make that much of a difference. Robots that read poetry would be nice, though, since there is a shortage these days of poetry readers.
Yes, I think it behooves anyone who writes publicly to use spelling- and grammar-checking tools, if only to catch the witless typos and other errors we’re all prone to, no matter our language proficiency.
Ironically, though, to utilize these tools most effectively, you almost have to be a grammarian or language expert to be confident enough to occasionally reject their suggestions. For example, if you write “twice as long as,” Word’s grammar checker suggests replacing “as long as” with “if,” reducing the sentence to nonsense. And everyone has seen inappropriate spelling suggestions (like the joke: A priest, a minister and a rabbit walk in to a bar. The bartender wonders: “A rabbit?” The rabbit shrugs: “Auto-correct.”).
In Dick’s book, androids (called replicants in the movie) are short on empathy, but they do appear to have good language proficiency. For some reason I’m kind of indifferent to the idea of robots writing, say, free verse poetry. There’s an enormous surplus of poetry being written now. Not sure a little more would make that much of a difference. Robots that read poetry would be nice, though, since there is a shortage these days of poetry readers.
As I saw on Twitter: everyone wants to write with AI, but no one wants to read texts done by AI :)