Microsoft Word is getting politically correct - Calls it “Ideas in Word,”
Microsoft Word is getting politically correct
We’ve come a long way from spell check, folks.
BY MARK SULLIVAN 05.08.19
Microsoft will soon preview a version of Word that will
use artificial intelligence to make your writing not just grammatically but
politically correct.
Microsoft doesn’t call it a “political correctness
check,” but that’s essentially what it is. Not that there’s anything wrong with
that.
Actually Microsoft calls it “Ideas in Word,” which refers
to a series of AI-driven features that help you format your document and write
better.
For instance, Word will decode acronyms for you, and tell
you how long it’ll take to read a given document. It’ll also underline words or
phrases that sound insensitive, and suggest corrections.
Say you write, “We need to get some fresh blood in here.”
The AI is likely to underline “fresh blood” and suggest “new employees”
instead.
It might underline places where your writing exhibited
gender bias. If you tend to say “mailman” or Congressman” in the generic, it
might suggest you use “mailperson” or “Congressperson.” If you use the term
“gentlemen’s agreement,” it may suggest you use “unspoken agreement” instead.
If you describe someone as a “disabled person” the AI
would suggest “person with a disability.” Person-first terminology is preferred
because it portrays the person as more important than the disability.
The “inclusiveness” checks are part of a larger group of
“Refine My Writing” tools that also include clarity, conciseness, punctuation,
and “sensitive geopolitical terms.” For that last one, the AI’s models look for
phrases that may be hard to understand by, or that might be offensive to,
someone in another country or culture, Microsoft says.
We’re a long way from spell check here, folks.
Spelling and grammar checks check the user’s words
against a fairly agreed-upon set of spellings or usage rules. Correcting words
for their “correctness” in the cultural or political sense seems like a more
subjective and slippery exercise. Actually, Microsoft hasn’t completely settled
on the full list of correctness checks the AI will run on the text.
For the various new checks, Microsoft assembled a team of
linguists and other experts to anticipate the poor word choices people might
make, and assemble lists of terms that would work better, Office Intelligence
product manager Malavika Rewari tells me. The AI’s training data also includes
Wikipedia pages, which are constantly being updated and corrected.
The good news is that just as you can ask Word not to
give you grammar suggestions, you can go into the settings and tell it not to
monitor the correctness or sensitivity of your words.
Personally, I don’t think I would turn off the
suggestions, at least not at first. I worry about unknowingly or accidentally
inserting terms or references in my writing that convey value judgements that I
don’t really mean. Regardless of how I feel about political incorrectness, it
must be better to at least know when I’m writing something that might offend.
Whether I use the Microsoft AI’s suggestion for improvement is my choice.
Microsoft says it will begin offering a preview of Ideas
in Word in June. I’m eager to try it out. Maybe with Word’s new AI superpowers,
the review will write itself.
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