#querching

[ymfingsteadilyon]

#this is very bad for those of us who struggle with spelling #I need the spell check to be just matching words to a properly spelled words list #because my brain *can't* do that reliably #years of old school spell check helped #but I've heard that some spell check is now giving people wrong spellings because it's not comparing to a dictionary #it's comparing to other people's spelling #and some of them are me

THIS.

Okay. It's time for an AI rant.

My nephew is 13 years old. Whenever he writes a paper for school, I check it over and fix all of his mistakes for him. He said to me, "Maybe I'll proofread your paper for you in exchange," meaning one of the scholarly articles I write for work. I said, "Cool," and gave him the file. And he said, "Well, this is full of errors! See, you always say you have a lot to correct on my stuff, and look at all the stuff you got wrong!" And I said, surprised, "What? Where?" Because I'm sure there are typos in the draft I sent him, but not, like, that many.

And then he pointed to the screen and said, "Look at all the blue and red lines you have."

And I said, "Yeah, but those are wrong. Like, those are blue and red lines I'm ignoring because the computer is wrong." And then I paused and added, "You know you can't proofread a paper by just looking at the red and blue lines, right?" And he gave me the blankest look, because that clearly is EXACTLY what he thinks. And it became even clearer suddenly why, whenever I correct something on his paper, his immediate reaction is, "It didn't have a blue or red line."

There's a very good reason for that: THAT'S BECAUSE THE COMPUTER ISN'T SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW THAT IT WAS WRONG.

I am so tired of being sold the idea that computers are better than humans and so we should just outsource everything to them, which is clearly the lesson my nephew is absorbing in U.S. middle school. COMPUTERS ARE NOT BETTER THAN HUMANS. Like, maybe they are better at humans at crawling through rubble to find people trapped inside. They are also better at preserving things in a searchable format. Things like that. Very limited circumstances.

I don't want to sound alarmist but everything I hear about people using generative AI freaks me out. It's not just that I'm freaked out by people being like, "I use it to write novels!" (Although I don't see how they do, I have tried to have it write fiction for me and the output was truly terrible.) But I recognize my bias around creative writing and so no one needs to credit my views on artificial writing. But! Other things are alarming, too! "I use it to brainstorm x, y, or z." But...why? Why not just...use your own brain...to...brain...storm? The computer doesn't even have a brain to brainstorm with! And you might be like, "But it comes up with things that my brain would never think of!" So would other people! You could also brainstorm with other people! Or even through Google to see what other people have thought before you (not AI). Please don't belittle the wonder of thinking.

I just feel like the marketing around generative AI boils down to "Wouldn't it be easier not to use your own brain to think about things?" Everyone. No. It would not be. Please just trust me on this. I'm not just an old person who is out of touch with technology or something. I promise. USE YOUR BRAINS. IT WILL BE OKAY.

[uhhhhmanda]

If you make short videos (reels, YT shorts, tiktoks) PLEASE I AM BEGGING YOU either don't use the auto-generated subtitles (by which I mean type your own not go without) or at least edit them before you post. The eggcorns are getting out of hand. I see a million of these fucking videos a day and I am starting to lose my grip on homophones. GET THIS: I recently learned that Google's spell checker has pivoted to suggesting frequently used spellings instead of correct spellings. YOU ARE ACTIVELY MAKING THINGS WORSE. PLUS!!!!! Screen readers are going to read this shit word-for-word so the confusion is even worse for people who use that software.

EDIT: Gifs too!!!!!!

[strawberry-pretzels]

google docs literally corrected my "sighed contentedly" to sighed constantly. fuck you google.

[agirlwithachakram]

Shoutout to my phone for defaulting a normal word to a fucking brand. yeah my boy is thinking about crushing himself under the weight of a superstore because of the chip on his shoulder. honestlyyyyyyyyyyyyy.

[ymfingsteadilyon]

And since they cut down the staff to a skeleton crew in late 2023, this is even more true. No, there isn't a J.K. Tumbling rubbing her hands and chortling to herself as she censors all maps of indigenous nations; moderation is automated until and unless somebody reports a mistake and the case (eventually, at some point) gets looked at by an actual person.

TL, DR: If you don't consider your spellchecker's autocorrections to "querch" and "groyne" to be signs of a TERF conspiracy (which, please don't), don't do it with Tumblr either.

tumblr has such a weird site culture people are downright hysterical about staff. i still go insane every time i see someone frame the porn bad as tumblr simply deciding they hated money and success and not as tumblr inevitably caving to the pressure that apple and payment processors put on nearly any website that allows sexual content. like it was bad thing that happened and you can be mad about it but why rewrite history and act like tumblr staff just sat up one day and were like 'lets torpedo our site traffic'

[jammed-one]

Grammarly you're supposed to be better than this.

[thebibliosphere]

Do you think the humansona of grammarly would be a querched up white boy?

Thank you for the mental image. I loathe it.

[mik-mania]

querched up white boy

[handageddon]

I hate the querched meme so bad. It's so tantalizingly close to being a real word.

Is it a quercine word, related to oak trees?

There are two big clogs in finding the meaning of the word. 1 is the querched meme. 2 is the amount of mistransposed instances of what was clearly quenched. Like metal working texts or drink menus.

But I have also seen it once or twice in places where quenched wouldn't make sense. Is it some kind of science jargon?

Is it a word in another language? Or are the other language instances I see it in ALSO from Google docs googling all over the place?

Anyway. I propose that we give the term a new meaning.

How about this? A querched up white boy now refers to a white boy stuck in an oak tree trying to get acorns.

[metaforth]

The Big Book of Bright Black

I'm Bright Black posting now so I need a place to organize everything! So welcome the Big Book of Bright Black!

It's a Google Doc.

[machine-saint]

so i've seen this post claiming that the reason that there have been so many 'autocorrect is shit' posts lately is because of a change in the backend, but this doesn't seem... plausible. for one thing, basically every search result on twitter for "querched" is talking about how it's an incorrect suggestion, which implies that people don't accidentally write it. compare "for all intensive purposes" which has a mix of people pointing out the malapropism and people actually just using it.

in particular, google has a massive corpus of books to train documents on, and if you do a frequency comparison of "quirked" to "querched", the latter doesn't even show up.

this also doesn't explain other bizarre autocorrect suggestions where the phrase and the suggestion are completely unrelated, such as "Democracy does" -> "Democrdoes" or "so were we" -> "water bottle"

i don't have a satisfying answer for why these bizarre mistakes are happening, unfortunately. i don't work at google and even if i did it's not like i could tell you the details of their models without being instantly fired. but OP's explanation is extremely implausible, and given that she lists herself as an author i doubt she has any more internal technical knowledge about how google trains its models than i do.

[bekandrew]

Crackfic challenge: write a smut scene, but you MUST* take every Grammarly suggestion, no matter how unhinged. *You can choose whether to make an exception for canon names

[cornbread-but-cringey]

just saw that google docs 'querched' post again, and while the post is hilarious, this specific version of it also includes a part where the op tries to describe the difference between "it's" with an apostrophe and "its" without. the difference is that the one without an apostrophe is a possessive, but op also says that this goes against english's normal rule of apostrophe-s-ing those, and i mean, i guess it would... if it weren't based on a pronoun.

possessive pronouns; theirs, yours, hers; don't have apostrophes. ('its' is technically an adjective and not a pronoun in most cases, but that's whatever. 'its' can be a pronoun sometimes. if it wants.)

[exceptionally-stupid]

Is there like a subreddit or something of those insane grammarly suggestions? Y’know the ones? Like that one that suggested changing “quirked” to “querched?” Is there anything like that?

[walltowalltitties]

querched up white boy

[vantondrawgon]

I can actually contribute an example for once! I can only assume this was caused by the creator of the original doc being German.

googledocs you are getting awfully uppity for something that can’t differentiate between “its” and “it’s” correctly