Is Microsoft trying to rehabilitate the image of Clippy?
Sure, the hypercaffeinated anthropomorphic paperclip designed to “assist” you in your writing may have been the worst addition to Microsoft Office ever. “Hi! It looks like you’re writing a breakup letter! Can I help you with some reasons why your significant other might not be the one for you?”
That digital irritant may have been removed from the program over a decade ago, but it still represents a nadir in Microsoft Word development.
I’m not sure anything can replace that stupid paperclip, but according to the business magazine Fast Company, Microsoft is rolling out a series of features called “Ideas in Word” to help users with their writing — and one of those features will have to do with whether your writing is sufficiently woke.
“Microsoft will soon preview a version of Word that will use artificial intelligence to make your writing not just grammatically but politically correct,” Fast Company reported Wednesday.
“Microsoft doesn’t call it a ‘political correctness check,’ but that’s essentially what it is. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
Sure, Jerry. I will grumblingly admit there are some interesting features here, including a tool that tells you how long a document will take to read and one that decodes acronyms.
It can pick out key points from a piece of text, Engadget reports, and help you with putting style tables together.
All right, cool. But then there’s this: It’ll underline words and phrases it thinks are politically incorrect or insensitive and then suggest replacements.
“Say you write, ‘We need to get some fresh blood in here,’” Fast Company reports. “The AI is likely to underline ‘fresh blood’ and suggest ‘new employees’ instead.”
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[Editor’s Note: This article was written by C. Douglas Golden and originally published at the Conservative Tribune. Title changed by P&P.]
