I blame Microsoft, of course.
Recently, despite my risible faithfulness to Hotmail, Microsoft's AI has been desperately trying to finish my sentences for me.
This has gone beyond trying to anticipate mere words. It's housed in the belief that whole phrases and sentences can be predicted and could Microsoft please just help me with that. Or perhaps in the notion that Microsoft knows what I'm going to write, so why can't I just get out of the way? Even if, all too often, the AI is completely wrong.
Which made me think how often I, and everyone else I know, texts "damned autocorrect" at least once a week. Actually, they don't text "damned." They text "ducking."
Yes, it was my iPhone that started all this, being its helplessly helpful self.
The Adventure Begins.
I decided I'd had enough.
How many times have I written that I was screaming and my iPhone insisted I was streaming? Or was it the other way around? There's also the sentences my iPhone thinks perfectly normal. Such as "I might get in the was." It's about as reliable at finishing your sentences or knowing what you want to say as a first date.
It isn't just my iPhone's self-righteousness. It's the fact that when it chooses to make corrections, it does it so quickly that you don't notice it's happened.
And that's when you end up sending the ducking autocorrect texts.
We're supposed to be going back to basics in our desperate times[1]. So I thought why not go back to the basics of spelling? Why not be personally responsible for the texts I send, rather than entrust my spelling to a machine that thinks it knows what I