A funny thing happened on the way to the poem
Built-in spelling & grammar check has become the bane of my existence! Why? Because it's so bad at what it does. How can a word be 'misspelled' in one sentence but 'correct' in the next? Same word, same spelling.
I have the misfortune of needing to rely on such technology as my eyesight isn't great and there seems to be some problem between my brain and fingers too. I also have the misfortune of having to use Google Docs, that horrible mess of really bad coding, for certain projects. The combination can make things difficult to say the least. I mean, why should I have to check the spelling and grammar of the spelling and grammar that was just checked by a spelling and grammar check? (Good luck figuring that out.)
So I thought I'd have a little fun with the program. I fed it some poetry.
First was Ogden Nash's "The Octopus":
Tell me O octopus I begs;
Is those things arms, or is they legs?
I marvel at thee, octopus!
If I were thou, I’d call me us!
Yes, it had problems with that. Didn't like the 'bad grammar'. I'm sure Mr. Nash would have been amused. Then I tried something more modern: a bit of Fire on the Mountain lyrics by Robert Hunter:
Long distance runner, what you standin’ there for?
Get up! Get out! Get out the door!
You’re playin’ cold music on the barroom floor.
You gave all you got, why’d you want to give more?
Not a single mark, despite the 'misspellings' (which I notice this program makes note of) where the 'g' is dropped from "standing" and "playing". Hmm. Are the AI's trained on Grateful Dead lyrics now?
Okay, time to feed it gibberish! I made up some nonsense for the purpose:
Him am sum weird kinda like not know.
In the segmentated valley feeding worzel.
If they be argument, which catsup sordid output scan?
Travek piece incarnate system ardulent.
Google Docs thinks "Travek" and "ardulent" aren't spelled correctly (to my knowledge they aren't even words) and doesn't like "they be argument". Bearblog has a problem with these and 'catches' "am sum", "segmentated", "worzel", "be argument", and for some reason "catsup" (considered an acceptable alternative of "ketchup" by most dictionaries). The randomness kind of reminds me of a very early S&G program I got to try out some 35 years ago which when the wording became more advanced than "See Spot run" it gave up and declared the writer was operating at post-graduate linguistic levels.
Go ahead: give your own favourite/least favourite spelling and grammar AI a trial on poetry and nonsense. See what it does with the works of Lewis Carroll.
And they want to run the world on this crap. Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster spinning in their graves while elementary school drop-out technology drives cars into emergency vehicles.