My trusted partner-in-scootering, Evie, has become a master in using artificial intelligence. She finds information about places to go to, about devices that might be of assistance for those of us who have specific mobility needs, and a bunch of other things that, before AI, required a lot of manual searching.
Please note that I am saying ‘manual’ in the broadest possible sense. Unearthing that information has actually become relatively and increasingly easy since the dawn of the internet. But in the 1970s, finding the opening hours of a library may have involved calling the place from your landline telephone before going there. Perhaps you wanted to get hold of a particular book, so you would also ask if they had it available, and when exactly.
You get the picture. A lot has become easier and faster thanks to computers, the internet, and AI, those scary things that were going to take over and spell doom for humanity.
Now, most of the spelling that AI does has to do with correcting our misspellings. I used to be against trusting spellcheck programs, because the early ones actually didn’t always provide correct results. They tried to guess what the writer intended to say, and guessed often wrong.
I declared I would never use those crappy programs.
Until my writing became a matter of tapping on my smartphone keyboard with my left thumb while holding the phone with my weak right hand.
Having had a stroke helped me with this quantum leap of trust. But that’s merely the spellcheck, isn’t it?
Hold on. This little spellcheck on my Android is now guessing the next word I was going to write even before I key in the first letter of that word, and 99% of the time it guesses correctly. So I am either extremely predictable as a writer, or the so-called spellcheck is really very competent.
To put my spellcheck to a test, I started writing a science fiction novel where intelligent otters from outer space are important characters. The spellcheck did not take long before it had learned the outlandish names I had given to my otters. It even started correcting me when I misspelled some of the gobbledygook I had invented as the otters’ language.
My point is, reactionary dinosaur though I am, I have now accepted AI as a part of my life at least as described here. I will still write my own nonsense, thank you very much, but I won’t mind if my AI spellcheck tells me I forgot the vocative case ending in my latest outburst of otter gobbledygook.
Thanks to Evie I am a little calmer while computers take over the world!
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