02 April 2020

GMail's autocorrect messing up your email?

We don't allow children to drive cars, but somehow people think it's ok to allow a self-driving car on the road...an algorithm that has no clue about what the world is and no clue about what driving is. AI has a long way to go before becoming intelligent.

Similarly, GMail tended to autocorrect our words for us, without even highlighting the words it autocorrected. The result? I typed "presenter" in a sentence and in the next sentence when I typed "presenting", GMail discreetly autocorrected it to "presenter", giving the sentence a grammatical error which gave a bad impression to the reader. I noticed the error only after sending the email. The minimum GMail could have done was to highlight the word that had been autocorrected or to ask for my consent before introducing the feature. Google seems to need better engineers.

When I first heard that a person lost his job because of autocorrect correcting a word to "hash brown" when he emailed a colleague, I didn't actually believe it happened unintentionally. But after seeing how autocorrect messed up my email, that man has all my sympathies.

There are many such examples. Some of these may be fictional, but they do drive home the point.

Autocorrect can be switched off in GMail in the General Settings. I recommend switching off all of the AI features that aren't reliable.