I Turned off Autocorrect

By Sondra Forsyth

I always proofread my text messages before hitting “send”. That used to be mostly because I wanted to catch any errors introduced by autocorrect. I’m sure you’ve seen posts on Facebook about funny autocorrect fails. However, as someone who copyedits, line edits, and writes for a living I would not be amused to have anyone receive a garbled message from me.

I know I’m not alone. A couple of days ago, I got a text from my son saying autocorrect makes him “look stupid”. The same day, I missed an autocorrect error in my text back to him, in spite of my attempt to proofread: “I’d” instead of “is” at the beginning of one of my sentences. Obviously, my thumb had hit the “d” instead of the ‘s”, and autocorrect quickly made a nonsense sentence that read “I’d there any way you can do this?” Arrgh!

That’s when I went into action Googling how to turn off autocorrect. The process turned out to be simple: Click on “Settings”, then on “Keyboard”, and then uncheck autocorrect. Hurray! Amusingly, my Google search also showed me a post by r/Punny on Reddit that said, “The person who invented autocorrect should burn in hello.” Not only that, but I found a post entitled “I Invented Autocorrect. Sorry About That, and You’re Welcome.” His name is Ken Kocienda, and he’s not actually sorry at all.

Be that as it may, I have now escaped from autocorrect hello. Heh, heh. In addition, I turned it off in Word. Now any mistakes that show up in my texts and documents are fully my own. I can handle that! Also, I reassured my son that he doesn’t “sound stupid”, and I encouraged him to turn off autocorrect.

Autocorrect is one of the more ubiquitous examples of so-called “Artificial Intelligence”. AI is surely a boon to some, but I find it creepy. That is largely because AI isn’t really intelligent at all. Saying that it is amounts to an insult regarding our actual intelligence. I’ll stick with my own brain, thank you very much.

Now I had better proofread this blog really well, or else I’ll be called on any errors that you’ll all know were mine and mine alone!

Sondra Forsyth is a Co-Editor-in-Chief of thirdAGE.com.