Just like money can’t buy happiness, autocorrect certainly can’t buy good spelling.
We’ve all been there—texting a friend, hitting send, and then realizing autocorrect has betrayed us. Instead of “I’m on my way,” autocorrect insists that I meant to say “I’m only mayonnaise.” Autocorrect is like a personal assistant who helps 95% of the time but occasionally sets your house on fire. It’s helpful—until you realize it’s making you forget how to spell. In a world where we increasingly rely on technology, are we actually losing our ability to write? And worse—do we even notice?
After a long time thinking about the topic for this blog, I realized my “assistant” is like money. Both exist to make our lives more convenient, but the more you use them, the more it has a hold on you. Just as money can cause one to forget how to budget, autocorrect will cause one to forget to spell. Just think about sitting down to a handwritten exam and discovering you don’t actually know how to spell “definitely” because when we type, our wonderful “assistant” will understand us just by us typing “defanatly.”
The Illusion of Effortless Success
All of last year, every assignment in English was online. Autocorrect was great, catching all my mistakes from spelling to basic grammar. However while writing in class for Mrs. Duda, the safety net was gone. With nothing to rely on, I am sure she had a great time figuring out what in the world I was trying to say.
I’m certainly not alone. Studies from the University of British Columbia have shown that autocorrect use is what makes us worse at spelling words correctly and writing grammatically. Autocorrect creates an illusion of mastery over language—until we are compelled to write by ourselves.
Usually, autocorrect errors are a laughing matter. Personally though, it doesn’t become so funny when I’m sweating wondering if it is necessary to have two s’s, two c’s, or both.
More Power, More Problems
Money is generally seen as a blessing and a curse. Too much: there is fear of losing it and it often has greater effects. According to another study by the Certified Financial Planner Board, most lottery winners go bankrupt in 3-5 years. Take lottery winners: suddenly rich, they lose their sense of financial responsibility. They spend like crazy, convinced the money will never run out. But when the money does eventually run out, they’re worse off than they were to begin with—unable to budget and normally in debt. Autocorrect creates the same sort of trap. It builds a false sense of linguistic competence. We type with confidence, assuming autocorrect will fix our mistakes, and when we don’t have it, our spelling and grammar skills are exposed as being weak. Like lottery winners who never learned to budget, we become dependent on a tool that was only supposed to be an occasional help, not a lifelong crutch.
Take the notorious iPhone “ducking” incident. Apple users fumed for years as autocorrect replaced a very specific word that starts with f and rhymes with truck (I think you know that I mean) with “duck.” No one was ever actually trying to send “What the duck?”—but there it was, ending up in conversations like some kind of manners censor bot. Apple even had to patch its software to recognize common expletives as intentional (NPR Breifing). Even still today, if that word is typed on my phone, the bar above my keyboard still tries to convince me that I am trying to say “duck.” It gradually trains us to trust its judgment over our own. When technology repeatedly overrides our choices, we start to doubt ourselves, creating a cycle of dependency that weakens our confidence in our own writing abilities. Again, why does my phone think it knows what I’m trying to say better than I do?
We would like to think autocorrect is helping us, but the truth is autocorrect is slowly leading us to become more dependent. Just like relying on inherited wealth can make someone terrible at managing money, relying on autocorrect can make us terrible at spelling. If you never have to try, you never really learn.
The Curse of Dependence
The biggest threat to both wealth and autocorrect? They make us dependent.
Imagine if suddenly all your money vanished, how would you survive? Where would you get your next meal? Where would you sleep? Now, suppose autocorrect vanished in an instant?
According to the UBC study on digital literacy used above, students who use spellcheck and autocorrect struggle with basic spelling when asked to write it out manually. That is to say that if autocorrect just vanished tomorrow, half of us would be texting with messages that look like they were written in ancient hieroglyphics.
And the worst part? We’d never even know how bad we’d become until it was too late. That’s the greatest danger of dependence—you don’t realize how far you’ve fallen until the security is gone. The intention of autocorrect is to catch us from silly typos. Just like when learning how to ride a bike, the training wheels make sure that it is unlikely to tip over. However, the intention is not for the rider to stick to the training wheels forever.
So, What Now? Does this then mean we all need to give up writing with pens and banning spell check? Unlikely.
The point is, though, balance is the answer. Use autocorrect but don’t be a mindless follower. Test yourself—switch it off for a day and see if you can manage without. Begin paying attention to yourself rather than AI correcting you. At the end of the day, autocorrect, like money, is just a tool. It can make life easier, or it can make us weaker. The real power isn’t in having it—it’s in knowing you don’t need it.
p.s. If you’re still with me here, autocorrect helped me with 83 words in the process of writing this blog. Amazing how large that number is when we become aware right?
Sources:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/03/ai-chatgpt-autocorrect-limitations/673338/
