Comment by verdverm
5 years ago
I think worse than keyloggers is that people are learning how to make the yellow lines in Grammarly go away rather than learning to write better. The training of humans on AI which was trained to be a (dull) average of prior humans has unforeseen consequences. I've seen Google grammar suggestions getting worse with time.
This may be the case, but "this tool is a potentially massive privacy and security intrusion" is a drastically different conversation than "calculators mean students can't do arithmetic anymore".
I think "calculators mean students can't do arithmetic anymore" is perhaps an uncharitable take because it ignores that calculators aren't also trying to learn arithmetic from examples of people using them. Eventually grammar correction algorithms will injest text written with them or other grammar correction algorithms as ground truth in their efforts to improve and adapt to new idioms- this may already be the case.
NLP researchers are tearing their hair out about this right now, since people are posting mountains of GPT/etc.-generated text online with no easy way to distinguish whether it's of human or other origin.
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This sounds like a case of "garbage in garbage out". Machine learning needs to account for that regardless.
Writing and arithmetic are a lot different. Activities involving math are very rarely done away from a phone, and computers are for all intents and purposes 100% reliable at it.
The best mathematician in the world will probably get the same answer I will on a calculator. At most maybe I'll get an irrelevant rounding error.
If there was only one good way to state any idea, no matter the context or intent, it would be different.
I could choose not to use grammarly if I had something to hide, with little trouble. It doesn't do anything most can't do themselves, or anything a local FOSS checker can't do once browsers start integrating them as they probably will someday.
The real danger would be a world in which I can't legally choose not to use it or for some other reason it is no longer a free choice.
Is journalism not part of how we prevent that?
This is comparable to the argument that programmers are learning how to eliminate compiler/linter warnings rather than learning how to program better. Immediate feedback is the best learning tool and one leads to the other. Of course, natural languages are far more complex and have no universal standard. While it is true that no easy way to check for style, be it in programming or writing, we should encourage the use of such tools (once they are secure and privacy-friendly) as writing assistants.
No, it’s comparable to your compiler/linter suggesting fixes when it spots issues. Pointing out an error is one level of knowledge, suggesting a fix is not in the same class. Take away the grammar tools’ ability to make suggestions, and you have something equivalent. You still have to know how to math/program with a calculator/compiler.
I couldn't agree more. Every now and then I let gmail auto complete for me, but it feels like my writing is just becoming generic.
Yet, I've used the same closing line for my emails for years. And Gmail still doesn't suggest it as completion.
"AI powered".
English is not my first language. Grammarly greatly improved my English, even when I'm not using it.
One of the beat ways to tell really peoficient foreign speaker of, in my case, German isn't the accent (as some people don't have one anymore) but a too perfect Grammar usage, either in writing (less obvious) or speaking (clear as day). I yried one of the German grammar tests of my son, and failed miserable, despite being a native speaker. My wife isn't, and she's so much better in German grammar then I am.
The gist: Don't worry too mich, just use the language. Most people are than delighted to meet a foreigner trying to speak their language.
"Perfect grammar usage" is only a negative when you have "perfect grammar knowledge", whatever that means. I'm actually knowledgeable enough to to be more spontaneous if I want. In reality I only use Grammarly on the desktop, which is only a tiny fraction of my usage of the English language. Things are not as black and white as they seem. I'm neither a child nor a robot.
It's the same with English. Maybe it's confirmation bias, but I've noticed many non-native speakers either write too formally, or choose the wrong synonym for the context. Everything is grammatically correct, but it just feels wrong.
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My wife told me that when she was studying Russian in college, some of the professors in the advanced courses would refer to certain phrasings as the "spy's variant."
You might be worrying a bit too much about what others think. I am English and if someone is, say, Russian, and writes to me in English, I don't care if their grammar is a little poor. The great thing about English is you can understand even when most of the words are in the wrong order :-)
Also, most English people don't know much about grammar anyway and lots of people still confuse things like there/their/they're; are/our; its/it's etc.
I think you skip the case when both communicating parties are not native speakers which is probably much more often case than when at least one side knows English well. And risk related to a misunderstanding caused by breaking grammar rules is much higher.
Also if you're not native speaker how do you know if the computer's suggestion is an improvement or a regression?
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Totally agree, we already have a generation of folks who don't know how to spell without the crutch of a spell-checker (I include myself as a victim), does Grammarly produce even worse outcomes?
The one caveat here (which I try to cover in this post) is there are definitely people who suffer from things like dyslexia who heavily rely on these types of tools to be able to communicate confidently. In that way, they are very useful.
Even worse: entirely new language primitives based on 10wpm mobile keyboards.
Despite the moral panic over the OG mobile keyboards in the noughties (remember the breathless "kids these days write txt spk, m8 in their English exams" headlines every year?), the pandemic of inability to "write good" never actually materialised among Millenials.
Indeed, it has been suggested that reductions like "wait" to "w8" even represent the same kind of phonological awareness of language that's correlated with better spelling.
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I mean "txt" speak is something only my parents still use. There are some shortenings like omw, ngl, ikr but they're not inventing new words.
I mean hell if this is the straw than the internet ruined that before I was born -- tldr, imho, afaik, mfw, /s.
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does it actually matter that people don't all the grammar rules or how to spell things? an english sentence contains a lot of parity data. when you do know all the rules, it can be painful to see the mistakes people make, but confusing "principle" with "principal" or using "who" when you should have used "whom" doesn't really obscure the meaning of the sentence.
when it comes to formal correspondence, spellcheck is always there to help. or better yet, get a copywriter or technical writer to help you and go back to your main responsibilities.
> does it actually matter that people don't all the grammar rules or how to spell things?
It does if you hold the view that teaching someone to speak and write is teaching them them think.
If that is correct than if someone does not know how to speak and write in a grammatically correct fashion then the implication is that they do not know how to think properly.
Even if there isn't a perfect 1to1 mapping between grammatically correct writing and thinking skills, I still think it's a good proxy for measuring a persons ability to think because in general the more you read, the better you get at writing, and the more you read, the more you know.*
* the traditional caveats apply with garbage in, garbage out.
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does it actually matter that people don't all the grammar rules or how to spell things?
Does it matter if someone does not write with perfect grammar and spelling? Probably not.
However at some point you have drifted so far from normal conventions that you are no longer communicating effectively. You can make reasonable arguments about both prescriptivism and descriptivism but if your spelling and grammar are so bad that someone can't understand you then you're not a descriptivist, you're just wrong.
I have encountered this more often than I'd like in professional settings. I work in software development, a field where precision is important, so if I'm looking at your job application and it's full of basic language errors then I absolutely will judge you for that.
Yes, clarity and grammar matter. For example, with your lack of capitalization, I wouldn't know if you were trying to help your Uncle Jack off a horse or your uncle jack off a horse.
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> does it actually matter that people don't all the grammar rules
No.
*ducks*
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I for one blame the Grammar-Nazis and their anti-semantic ways
ok, i'll let myself out.
Good writing is probably like dressing up. It's not just what people think of you, you think of yourself better too.
I know, we should also get rid of Calculators because people should just do all math in there head
Hell let get rid of computers as well, people should just do everything manually, if you need to communicate drive to the person an talk to them, if you need to write something get out the hammer, chisel and rock...
</endsarcasm>
No Computers, Spell Check, nor grammar check has not ruined civilization or made people stop learning things...
we use calculators because you can't do the kind of arithmetic in your head that calculators are made to perform, and because random arithmetic isn't conducive to understanding math. If you can't add two single digit numbers any more I'd start to be concerned.
Having a proper understanding of grammar and spelling is relevant even in verbal communication. Tools should be used to augment human capacity, not used as an excuse to justify atrophy of basic skills.
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I use it, but only as a suggestion.
Having been subjected to a thrashing early on by a really good editor, they will stress that their isn’t always to correct and re-write your work - they’re often there to mark areas that need clarity or don’t fit the norms of editorial standards.
If they just fixed everything for you, you wouldn’t improve at all.
This experience made me much more careful about the way I write, and who I write for.
my grammar actually improved from proof-editing my essays on grammarly