Pink Lexical Slime: The Dark Side of Autocorrect

Summary

This post originally appeared on Mondo 2000. We’ve awaited the age of artificial intelligence for decades. In our fantasies, AI is usually humanoid, straight out of the Jetsons. But while we anticipate the great arrival of the robotic butlers, AI has, in fact, already quietly permeated the fabric of our daily lives — from shopping, to driving, to communication. Consider autocorrect, an AI-driven input assistant so ubiquitous that you likely don’t even realize how much it impacts your life. Without it, typing on a smartphone would be exceedingly difficult. That utility comes with a price, however, as autocorrect has begun to significantly alter the way we communicate. Though you probably first encountered autocorrect as telltale squiggly red lines under your spelling mistakes, its breakthrough came with the smartphone. As you mash the tiny keys on your phone’s virtual keyboard, a sophisticated language model, working behind the scenes, determines which keys you actually intended to press. The iPhone, for example, invisibly enlarges those keys you are likely to hit next, so they are harder to miss1. Naturally, spelling is automatically checked in the process. This hybrid of input assistance and spellchecking is what we now know as autocorrect. Prior to autocorrect, spellcheck was constrained to word processors. Its impact was limited, affecting primarily formal documents like letters and essays. Now, thanks to autocorrect, which mediates everything typed on a smartphone — casual and formal speech included — spellcheck is essentially universal. While the Standard English which spell check enforces may be preferable within the context of a formal document, this isn’t necessarily the case elsewhere. Autocorrect’s insistence on “ducking” (instead of the much coarser exclamation) is infamous, but its rigidity goes beyond cursing. If you actually prefer the spelling “miniscule,” you must wrestle with autocorrect. And because actual humans adapt quickly to change (and even a...