Written by Neil Levy
I recently received an email from someone about a grant application in which I’m involved. In this email, the person coordinating the grant asked recipients to suggest revisions to the text, but noted that as it stood it had a score of 100% on Grammarly. He asked that any changes be made carefully, so that this score was retained.
Grammarly uses AI to identify grammatical errors and stylistic infelicities and to suggest changes. I don’t use Grammarly, but other services I use make different suggestions. Gmail, for example, makes reply suggestions and Word underlines spelling mistakes.
These AI-driven tools alter the landscape of affordances for me as a writer. The affordances of an object or an environment are the suggestions for use embedded in it. The handle of a cup affords holding; a gap in a fence affords exiting there. Of course we may ignore or override afforances. If you prefer to hold your cup by the base, ignoring the handle you may do so, and you can climb the fence to leave at some other spot. But it takes effort (sometimes minimal) to override affordances. We usually go with the flow, and develop habits of relying on them. There’s nothing wrong with that: we can spare our energy for other things and in any case, many affordances are well-designed to facilitate action.
I may also ignore the affordances of predictive text and Grammarly nudges. I often do ignore the spelling suggestions Word makes: often, the word it marks as incorrect is a proper name or a technical term. When I’m unsure about a word, or about a formulation, I go with the flow, however. I accept the suggestion. Sometimes, especially when I’m using a mobile, I’ll use one of the Gmail reply suggestions, usually tweaking it for appropriateness.
What’s wrong with that? As I said, well designed affordances are useful. They enable us to pursue our goals more efficiently. They can also allow us to better coordinate with one another: if the paths funnel foot traffic in different directions onto different trajectories, we need to spend less time negotiating our way round one another. But the rollout of affordances also has a homogenizing effect. This may be especially the case when they’re AI-driven. I don’t know how the algorithms I’m using work, but they may well be based on machine learning using as its database text on the internet. If that’s what is going on, the suggestions will reflect what people already tend to do and reinforce it.
The …….
Source: http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2021/12/writing-is-not-that-easy-grammarly-as-affordance/