sperra

meau tender (the account formerly known as hector sperra)

@sperra

rather tender <3

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actor/improviser, writer & essayist, urban planner, computer scientist, amateur media scholar, Chicago lover, tupperware container for multitudes, #1 fleabag fan

it was an honor to be here, cohost <3

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sperra
@sperra

hey tech people of cohost: any guesses as to why google docs spellcheck is fucking abysmal right now? (and is it AI?)

I've noticed docs getting especially, ah, creative, with its suggestions recently, and it's not just me. my friends in a writing discord group posted these especially choice images, and say anecdotally that many of their pals are experiencing it too.

what's going on here? is garbage from LLM training seeping into the spellcheck dictionaries somehow? is it something else?

a quick google search (which does not seem to be a reliable way of getting answers to this query, for multiple reasons) gives some sense that people have been noticing a significant dropoff in quality for about a year now, but earlier complaints were alluding more to spellcheck NOT picking up on obviously wrong mistakes— not inventing its whole own incorrect grammar as it's doing here (and as I've experienced as well)

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in reply to @sperra's post:

M00se0nTheLoose
@M00se0nTheLoose

I have an idea, but might have no sort of basis in anything real.

I feel like many (10+) years ago Google Maps used to be better. Since then I find more and more... weird suggestions from it. Usually things like you'll be on a main road, it wants you to get on a side road for 2 minutes, and then merge back onto the same main road. It might technically save me a few seconds, but it's not worth getting off a main road back onto the main road (unless there's an accident or something, which there usually isn't). And then other little things like that. My only guess as to what's happening is that Google Maps was learning what route locals tended to take, and started suggesting those more often? Other than that no clue as to why these sort of things kept happening.

I wonder if it's something similar with auto correct - where it's trying to learn what people typically will type and so is just simply learning the wrong way to spell things

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reccanti
@reccanti

I wouldn't be surprised if AI is making it worse, but I feel like it's been unhelpful to me for years now. I feel like every time I type a word wrong, even if I know it's wrong and I just switched some letters or forgot to put a space between two words, I just get no suggestions. Maybe I'm just remembering Word 98 too fondly or something?

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LiteraryWizard
@LiteraryWizard

I take notes for some of the meetings I'm in at work that are full of technical jargon and industry phrases which has made it relatively easy to see how Word has been getting worse. I first noticed it last October and it go so bad by February of this year that I just turned off the program's automatic review stuff. I think they're using different data than Google Docs since that has, in my experience, been getting worse more recently and in really weird ways whereas Word was mostly just suggesting wrong homophones or incorrect words rather than the weird stuff Docs has begun suggesting.

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ewie
@ewie

one thing i’ve noticed is that autocorrect no longer parses the document as sentences but instead autocorrects based on edits. so if you type a word and then come back and edit it later then the edit is parsed as a separate word i think? it’s weird

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