Baldur BjarnasonWe used to have working spelling and grammar checkers. Why does everybody in tech pretend you need a whole-ass LLM to check for typos?
MacCruiskeen@baldur As a production editor who has spent some time proofreading and copyediting, I am not entirely sure we've ever had working spelling and grammar checkers. I've never lacked for work.
@maccruiskeen The LLMs aren't an improvement, though.
@baldur Oh, definitely not. The old checkers would make mistakes and miss stuff, but they didn't just make shit up. At work we've started using a non-AI Word plugin called PerfectIt that can actually check against Chicago Manual of Style rules, and it's useful, but it has its limits. I don't expect to be out of a job any time too soon.
eta: We've also started playing with an AI-based system to provide alt-text for remediating backlist ebooks. It's very hit or miss. It kind of highlights that the main limitation of any automated system is failure to understand context.