helpful my A(I)rse

Now I'll admit it.  When typing a message or anything really on my phone I struggle with large fingers and small characters.  And even while typing on a full-size keyboard things sometimes go wrong and a misspelling or mistake creeps in.

In the past this wasn't so bad, with Apple (my weapons of choice) correcting things usually, erm, correctly, and replacing my jumbled mass of letters with the right word.

But today things seem very different.

The boom in AI, and in particular the way it "helps" with writing is doing my head in.  It really is. Now, it seems, AI thinks the word I typed correctly and in context wasn't what I actually intended and changes it to something looking the same but with a completely different meaning.

For instance, the other day I typed a sentence with the word "women" in it.  But my phone decided "woken" would be more appropriate!  Just how?

whoa, hang on I only asked if you and your wife could help me cut down a tree some day...

And when I was creating the "meet Engelbert" post last month, I typed "on waking and finding a spider crawling across your ved (sic)".  I obviously meant to type "bed".  But did Microsoft's AI change ved to bed though?  No, it decided that I actually meant to type vet!  Imagine waking and finding a spider crawling across your vet?  That raises all sorts of questions!

It doesn't always intervene though, with obvious slight spelling mistakes going uncorrected even when there is only one possible replacement.

So, now, I am forced to read and re-read every single text message or email (there we go, it just changed email to evil (oh the irony) despite me spelling it correctly) before I send it for fear of some completely innocent "how are you" message being transformed into a friendship ending poison pen letter!

If only I could find a way to turn all this nonsense off.  Hang on. I'll just ask Siri... 

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It's so unbelievably exciting that I forgot to let you know about this week's video.  Here's a link to it: