Google Docs Starts Nudging Some Users To Write Less Dumbly 72
Many users have started to report that they are seeing suggestions -- such as grammar and spelling fixes -- to improve their writing when using Google Docs. The company made the announcement about this earlier this month. From a report: A purple squiggly line will appear under suggestions to help make your writing more concise, inclusive, active, or to warn you away from inappropriate words. These new Google suggestions have long been available via third-party services like Grammarly, which is able to integrate with Google Docs and aims to help improve the quality of your writing. Depending on the quality of Google's native suggestions, it could vastly reduce the need for these third-party services. Does it count as "sherlocking" when someone other than Apple does it? The catch is that Google isn't rolling out these assistive writing features to all of its Workspace plans. It says the "Tone and Style" suggestions will be available for "Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, [and] Education Plus" subscribers.
Turns out the danger was never Skynet (Score:5, Funny)
Looks like the real danger was Clippy [theverge.com] becoming self-aware, and propagating itself to all corners of the internet.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Turns out the danger was never Skynet (Score:1)
It will probably be an evil version of clippy instead of just the annoying one we all know and love. Notice how they said it will be more "inclusive". So for example, it will quietly replace the word "Taiwan" with "China", and replace all male pronouns with gender neutral pronouns, it will replace the word "master" with "main", and replace the word "field" with "place where we grow and harvest grain".
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That's *exactly* why everyone thought he was safe, until . . .
MS-Zombie (Score:3, Insightful)
Clippy and Bob keep getting re-re-invented as the "latest and greatest" digital assistant and VR lab. I guess every generation has to take it in the tush to learn the lesson yet again. Who knows, someday somebody may actually get it right.
Re:Turns out the danger was never Skynet (Score:4, Funny)
Clippy: "It looks like you meant 'write better' instead of 'less dumbly'. The second sounds Trumpian. Are you a Republican?"
Re: Turns out the danger was never Skynet (Score:5, Funny)
With GPT-3, this level of automated passive agressiveness is entirely possible!
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Don on Ecstasy?
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Re: Turns out the danger was never Skynet (Score:2)
That should have been obvious. He was always a, paperclip, maximizer.
Don't let stupid hide. (Score:2)
Let it be on display. Why cover up the "danger" sign next to the abandoned well?
Re:Don't let stupid hide. (Score:4, Insightful)
To allow the people whose faces are buried in their phones to fall in.
But clearly not ./ (Score:2)
But clearly they did not nudge the ./ editors.
The next step (Score:2)
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I think /. gave up on that claim about, what . . . six, seven years ago? Sometime before 2016, I remember that much.
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Dream on. Slashdot has filters that block typing ellipses with dots, and the use of multiple hyphen when trying to format a little table in the text, but are blind to regular N@zi ASCII "art" spam, although it will block all use of the word N@zi's even if it is part of a URL about N@zi Germany.
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I type ellipses with dots all the time. Maybe it's only triggered if you're using plain-old text instead of HTML
Three Shalt be the Number of Dots (Score:5, Funny)
When thou typeth a post thou shalt use three dots for thy ellipses, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt use, and the number of the dots shall be three. Four shalt thou not use, neither shalt thou type two, excepting that thou then typeth a third. Five dots is right out! Once the number three, being the third number, be typed, then clickest thou thy submit button and thy post shall be sent towards thy foes, who shall call thee a troll and ruineth thy karma.
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no fewer*
(Sorry, I normally wouldn't, but in an article about grammar I feel compelled to.)
Can it be turned off? (Score:4, Interesting)
And does it STAY turned off? Because Google has a really nasty habit of implementing 'cool new stuff' (in their eyes anyway), without a possibility to turn it off.
And even if you can turn things off, they often re-enable themselves automagically on a random update.
Re:Can it be turned off? (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is Google Docs. Everything you type gets immediately sent to the cloud even without this feature.
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Had it in Gmail for a while, you can turn it off. I left it on though, after using it on mobile for a while. It often guesses the rest of common phrases, which appear ghosted in front of the cursor. It doesn't interrupt or annoy you like Clippy.
Less Dumbly (Score:2)
I assume the "Less Dumbly" headline was some sort of joke.
You will be a grey drone (Score:3)
No being weird, anti social, uncommon, or anything that will ruffle others feathers.
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It's called "Loving Big Brother".
The best way to write better (Score:1)
The best way to write better is to decide you want to write better, and start working on it. With a dictionary at your fingertips and a ready willingness to use it. Learn how then proofread your own work. Make it a habit. Works much better than any nagging.
I do. I always turn off all squiggly lines and spell- and grammar checking. It's my job, I want to do it, so I can learn from my mistakes, so I do that myself.
This does require that you are minimally competent in the language you're writing. Good enough
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Re:The best way to write better (Score:4, Informative)
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The best way to write better is to decide you want to write better, and start working on it. With a dictionary at your fingertips and a ready willingness to use it. Learn how then proofread your own work. Make it a habit. Works much better than any nagging... This does require that you are minimally competent in the language you're writing. Good enough that you can spot your own errors. If you can't do that, what was highschool for? Time to revisit that until you are good enough to critique yourself meaningfully.
Even competent, capable, and literate book authors with a good grasp of grammar and spelling make mistakes. That's why book publishers employ copy editors, whose specialty is catching and correcting errors. Even at that, they sometimes get it wrong, even though they habitually read backwards in order to avoid the "I know what's next" reading phenomenon that allows us to miss mistakes because our brains are good at extracting correct meanings from mangled data.
BTW, I doubt that "highscool" appears in any rep
The Slashdot Effect, circa 2022. (Score:2)
"...Nudging Some Users To Write Less Dumbly."
With headlines written like that, it's rather obvious the Slashdot effect isn't what it used to be.
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That has to be a tongue in cheek joke, because surely /. editors aren't that stupid..
Wait.. What?
How to comfort someone with grammar problems. (Score:5, Funny)
You pat them on the shoulder and whisper "There, they're, their"
Subject (Score:1)
Lost cause (Score:5, Insightful)
We are too far down the rabbit hole of ineptitude and not caring that these "nudges" won't make a difference. People can't even speak coherently. You expect them to write any better?
Bruh! (Score:2)
lowkey no cap writing is chalked bruh google is sus
--
Not knowing anything is the sweetest life. - Sophocles
Even Grammarly is mostly garbage. (Score:2)
I can't see Google doing any better, considering the way some of their products operate.
I've used Grammarly a bit for my own writing. I find it mildly helpful in a last-pass edit on long-form fiction to catch the little things, like a missed comma or misplaced quote or something, but patently dumber than a box of rocks level stupid on the bigger issues, like world choice, phrasing, and such. Especially funny is that, if you actually let it make all the changes it wants to make to a document, which I do for
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I noticed that as well. Especially the re-wording problem. I think the problem was that the sentence needed to be completely re-written. Then it worked. In my case I think it helped a lot. I was doing a lot of things wrong because I learned it wrong.
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When MS added "grammar check" to Word 5.1 on the Mac, I checked it out.
I had the fastest machine available at the time, an SE/30.
And it took a minute a paragraph.
That might not have been so bad, as I could have left it to do its thing while doing something else.
But every single thing it told me was wrong!
(kind of like when we were asked to test a plagiarism checker at Penn State. I fed a couple of papers in. Any correctly cited quote was flagged as problematic, while putting in an entire working paper th
I wonder what "suggestions" they'll make (Score:3)
When my writing refers to Google as "a loathsome pack of evil, excrement-gobbling privacy rapists".
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When my writing refers to Google as "a loathsome pack of evil, excrement-gobbling privacy rapists".
User: It appears you are being too hard on yourself. All that personal data we are collecting is hardly excrement. You are a value to us and all those around you, and we appreciate you feeding us. Except your daughter, she doesn't value you and didn't even tell you she was pregnant.
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I think that story about the girl's father finding out she was pregnant "because ads" is getting a bit old now, isn't it?
My wife has ME for that. (Score:2)
Thank G*d my wife's addicted to Office. I just got her off MS-Office and onto LibreOffice. The first time it grammar checks her, I'm sure I'll be walking her through turning off grammar check within seconds (she loves spell check; I never use it, but now I love it, too). I don't think anybody wants to hear that they're us
"Show inclusiveness suggestions" (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, just what we need. The oxymoron of being inclusive by excluding insufficiently progressive language, pushed onto all Google Docs users by default. So, who chooses what "inclusiveness" includes? I'm guessing they have a highly diverse group photo and very little diversity of viewpoint.
Here's the other fun part: If you spell-check a document or grammar-check a document, you can correct all the little red and blue squiggles and your document will stay correct. But inclusive language is (intentionally) a moving target. So every time you open your document, there will be new inclusiveness suggestions to correct.
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Being prescriptive with language is the opposite of inclusive. It has the habit of trying to standardize language and erasing regional dialect. Appalachian English, AAVE, Pennsylvania, Southern, and Texan and many others just in the US. All with different phrasings and word choices.
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More bluntly, I want to know if it promotes "less dumbly", *or* "inclusive."
That's an either/or situation . . .
Alphabet can't hoard my words (Score:2)
I prefer not to share my brilliant words with Google. Personal computers have had text editors from the beginning. Why use the services of a data broker?
I do use Google Calendar. Very convenient for all my devices, but what about privacy? WritInAWayThatG'gleDsntUndrstnd.
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Showing results for Write In A Way That Google Doesn't Understand
Search instead for Writ In A Way That G'gle Dsnt Undrstnd
Yeah - you had to remove spaces for it to hide, but that's because you used capital letters for chunking and they could easily interpret that too.
Where it's *really* needed... (Score:2)
I think these features are a good idea in principle -- but there are at least a few more places where this kind of feedback is legitimately needed:
And I'm sure some people are going to take exception to this and probably down-vote me, but no... none of those are tongue-in-cheek. I receive emails and text/chat messages at work from so-called "professionals" in their field who routinely substitute letter/number abbreviations for words which genuinel
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Oblig, XKCD (Score:3)
481 [xkcd.com]
We need this ... (Score:2)
... where I'm working. I'm astounding at the low level of writing ability demonstrated in the everyday communications. It's even worse in the technical documentation -- that's intended to be used for reference and training purposes -- where it's not uncommon to encounter documents that are obviously comprised of sentence fragments and/or paragraphs that have been cut-n-pasted together from different documents written by multiple people who all described the same concept using different wording. Proofreadin
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It's even worse in the technical documentation -- that's intended to be used for reference and training purposes -- where it's not uncommon to encounter documents that are obviously comprised of sentence fragments and/or paragraphs that have been cut-n-pasted together from different documents written by multiple people who all described the same concept using different wording.
And don't forget the run-on sentences :-)
Beyond STASI (Score:1)
Where's the woke/non-woke checkbox? (Score:2)
Oh, wait, that would be the same as turning the damn thing off and using the proper English you were supposed to have learned in... wait for it... grammar school.