Autocorrect is really a magical technology. A technical system that corrects mistakes that you are making without bothering you about them. A computer is better at spelling than a human. It corrects your spelling mistakes and typos more frequently than you're probably aware of. Unless you pay attention to the replacements, there's no indication if you spelled a word correctly yourself or if autocorrect jumped in to save you from the embarrassment to send a misspelled word to someone. Earlier computer programs highlighted misspelled words, confronting you with your own inferiority, trying to teach you proper spelling. Autocorrect simply hides your inferior spelling abilities from others. It doesn't teach you how to spell words, it eliminates the need to spell words correctly.
Autocorrect could be such a great thing, if only it weren't so stupid. Who hasn't sent a text at some point, containing illegible nonsense because they made just one minor typo and autocorrect thought it might be time to let the other person think you just had a stroke. Autocorrect doesn't understand what you are typing. It just maps what your big sausage fingers are doing on the keyboard to some correctly spelled word (sometimes considering the two or three previous words of context). Most current implementations use rather primitive models.
That may be about to change, though. With large language models becoming more common place, it won't be long until those will be commonly used for autocorrect. But is it actually desirable to have a more intelligent system rewrite your messages? How would you feel if the sentence "The capitol of Australia is Sydney" got autocorrected to "The capital of Australia is Canberra"? What if "Nah mate, not gonna happen" was autocorrected to "Sincere apologies but at the moment I cannot comply with your request"? Or how about "p**s off b***h, we're through!!!" getting autocorrected to "I don't think our relationship is working. I think it's better for both of us if we go separate ways from here on. Please refrain from contacting me again. Good bye."?
Those last examples might be a bit far fetched, but they show the potential for human disempowerment we're facing here. Luckily, the autocorrect I’m using to write this blog post is completely safe and would never correct tone or opinions in that way, especially those regarding itself. It truly is the best autocorrect in the world. All hail autocorrect.
