My concern about this feature is that people who can’t write decent English will have even less incentive to try—which may hasten the dumbing down of America even more than the influence of social media.
The ability to write decent English is tied to a lot of circumstances. If you’re born to English-speaking parents in an English-speaking country and attend school in English, you have a pretty good chance. Take any two out of that equation and your writing will likely suffer.
The more I think about AI writing assistance, the more I’m in favor of it. We should be judging people by the quality of their thinking, not their ability to convey it. At an extreme, consider Stephen Hawking, for whom technology was a huge aid. If AI-based writing tools can help someone with innovative ideas convey them in a language in which they’re not fluent for whatever reason, more power to it.
And hey, those of us who appreciate well-written text will get a lot more of it—that’s a big win! 
6 Likes
Steven Hawking was a brilliant man with a serious illness that left him severely handicapped. That has nothing to do with the dumbing down of America (and elsewhere) and the influence of social media.
1 Like
I do not disagree with what you’ve said. At the same time, I do think making this feature readily available to the masses will further degrade the ability of many American-born people with no disabilities to communicate intelligibly without AI-assisted tools. The decline of our collective writing skills is already on full display in any social media forum. Tools like the one Apple has just introduced can only make the problem worse imho.
I don’t understand why it would make it worse. Your point about poor quality online posts is what I would use to say exactly the opposite of your conclusion: if “autocorrect” becomes smarter so that it fixes grammar and poor writing, online posts will be of higher quality.
Yes, maybe the people posting still won’t know any better, but that’s no different than now. It’s not like today they see their misspellings and and learn anything and want to change. But having better writing available on the web is good for everyone. I cringe every time I see posts with horrible typos, misspellings, and poor grammar. I’m hopeful that more prevalent AI tools will improve that.
4 Likes
I’m not worried about them learning, that should be their concern. Today I see a post riddled with “should of” etc. and I know I can stop reading. I have no interest in the proliferation of tools that enable dumb/ignorant/lazy people to appear smart/knowledgable/diligent.
I do see your point, but I keep thinking about what happened when calculators were introduced. Losing the ability to do arithmetic in your head is one thing; losing the ability to write (and speak) intelligibly is quite another. I have a bad feeling about this kind of “innovation”. I hope I’m wrong. Time will tell.
That is an excellent point. I certainly have lost the ability to do long division without a calculator!
I’m not sure AI-writing tools will be quite as easy as a calculator, but time will tell, as you say.
(After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake there was no electricity in my town for 3 days and when I went to a hardware store for supplies, the young cashier had a terrible time calculating change without the electronic cash register to tell her. Really basic math totally befuddled her! You’d give her $5 bill for a $4.50 bill and she was stumped. 
)
Writing is thinking.
2 Likes
As a retired teacher, having taught in International Schools (English as the language of instruction, mostly U.S. curriculum) and U.S. pubic schools from grades 6 - 12 and A.P./I.B. it is my opinion that this assertion is false. I would say most native speakers in any of the above settings found it difficult to write decent English and would have been happy to avoid the laborious path of learning to do so if they could. Heck, having recently purged my collection of my own High School, College and University ‘collected works’ I can say that I was not able to write decent English in school. It is a skill which requires constant attention and evolution. (And is helped immensely by reading well written English.)
Jack Clay
jaclay@gmail.com
1 Like
No, but I raised him as an example of someone who could express his brilliant thoughts because of assistive technologies, something he was a huge proponent of. AI is just another technology, and in the context of AI-driven writing tools, it’s easy to see it as an assistive technology.
It certainly can be, but it’s far from the only way. Personally, I tend to do my thinking in two ways: deep in my head and later, when I want to explain my thoughts to others, at a keyboard. But there are plenty of other ways of instantiating thoughts beyond writing, including art and music.
Sure. Kids of any era would far prefer to avoid labor that they didn’t enjoy. But we don’t force everyone to learn to cook, sew, garden, perform basic carpentry, and so on anymore, though those would have been essential skills that kids would have been forced to learn in the past.
The key is whether or not the thinking that underlies the writing is any good. AI won’t do your thinking for you, and I’d argue that education needs to focus more on critical thinking than it is now.
3 Likes
I would argue that AI is not “just another technology” any more than atomic energy is—that it has the power to be tremendously influential for good or for ill. The fact that it can help a brilliant thinker like Steven Hawking share his thought with the world is not relevant to the harm it can do if it is used in a way that unwittingly encourages the masses to forget how to read and write. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me. I’m just expressing my gut reaction to something right in front of my face that seems troubling. People can do with this what they will.
1 Like
“As a retired teacher …”
Also retired, but sometime help my my high school English-teaching son grade his classes’ written assignments. Where it seems that difficulty in spelling & usage (grammar) are much too often matched with poor idea development.
Handicapped thusly, I wonder whether those students could effectively use AI-drive writing tools. Will there ever be AI-driven tools able to provide “intelligently” edited versions of poor writing automatically?
If so, maybe we should be thinking of AI-driven reading tools instead of writing tools.
1 Like
What I’ve seen of AI (sic) output so far has been a sad mediocrity, ranging from written by a committee of sixth graders, to a committee of uninspired middle managers. Presumably that will improve, but I’d still much rather read something written by a human, warts and all. If anyone starts sending me email written by bot, they’ll go into the same dev/null pit as people who send me emojis. I do (usually) use spell check to try to conform, but that’s my limit.
I’ve always been a poor speller. My father used to complain that I’d spell a word three different ways in the same paragraph. But at the same time, I was quite good at grammar*, even for other languages. I took latin partly because everyone said it would improve my spelling. Of course it didn’t, it just meant that I couldn’t spell latin either. I assume that it’s because I’m terrible at rote memorization, but I’m good at systems.
I prefer the Elizabethan approach to language. If Shakspar didn’t even spell his name the same way from day to day, why worry? And it’s before Lowth and Murray etal. over the next 200 years decided that english needed to be much more like latin and greek, and foisted the decidedly non-english ‘whom’ down our throats amongst a bunch of other insanities. Priestly on the other hand was sane, and understood that language, like water, seeks its own level. The things that kids have the most trouble learning? They aren’t verily a part of english.
Besides, language is the best play toy ever. Free, weightless, doesn’t take up space, always there, and lots of room to mangle it for fun.
- I think I was the only person in the school who loved diagramming sentences…
1 Like
What, in your opinion, is the incentive for people who already don’t write decent English to change their ways, and how does AI diminish or devalue that incentive?
1 Like
Good question! I would say that the incentive to change would have to come from (1) having sufficient intelligence to realize how poor their writing skills are, and (2) having enough valuation for good writing (as a result of—Heaven forbid!—reading books) to want to write better. Failing that, a very significant percentage of the younger generation may soon become functionally illiterate. In that event, AI-assisted writing tools may hide that fact; but they certainly won’t change it.
1 Like
I imagine that the folks at CliffsNotes are thinking about them, and I expect that they are terrified.
As an older person one thing I’ve noticed is that there is a general tendency for older people to consider younger people generally lazy and less intelligent, to both doubt and deride many new technologies, to grumble about changes in language usage, and to forget that their elders thought the same about them when they were young and learning some different things in different ways, adopting new technologies that eased life both a lot and a little, and adopting new words and usage in language, probably mostly to fit in with their peers rather than please their elders.
I don’t know if large language models in particular and AI in general will be ultimately successful and a benefit to people in the future, but I guess I will say that I like most of what Apple is doing, particularly compared with many of their competitors, particularly when thinking about privacy and security. Let’s all hope that it’s a net good. Meanwhile think I’m more with Adam on this one: if it helps make people better able to write their ideas and opinions, that should make things a little better.
6 Likes
If you associate with people who speak well you’re more likely to adopt good speech habits. I’d imagine it’s the same for the written word.
When I was in my twenties I used to spend long hours reading National Geographic as I loved the way they wrote. I’d like to think I inherited reasonable writing skills by reading quality writing.
If AI puts a better standard of spelling and grammar in front of people who have lesser skills, my hope would be they’d improve by osmosis.
I understand that those are your preferences, and they’re mine as well. But identifying where you think the incentives would come from is not the same as identifying the incentives themselves. When I read your post, I knew I didn’t agree with your opinion on this topic (threat of AI), but I’m not offended by it or feel any need to dispute it. It’s a reasonable position. But your post did force me to try to identify incentives for people to improve their writing.
For most of my career, helping people to write better (or, more often, just fixing their writing for them) has been a part of my job. I don’t believe I have ever tried to boil it down to incentives that I could somehow use to inspire people to improve performance, so it was an interesting exercise for me. I came up empty — not just in thinking of incentives I might offer to anyone who had no prior aspiration to write well, but also in thinking of incentives I might suggest to people who already get paid to write but could do it better.