05.08.19
Microsoft Word is getting politically correct
By Mark Sullivan

Microsoft will soon preview a version of Word that will use artificial intelligence to make your writing not just grammatically but politically correct.

Microsoft doesn’t call it a “political correctness check,” but that’s essentially what it is. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Actually Microsoft calls it “Ideas in Word,” which refers to a series of AI-driven features that help you format your document and write better.

For instance, Word will decode acronyms for you, and tell you how long it’ll take to read a given document. It’ll also underline words or phrases that sound insensitive, and suggest corrections.

Say you write, “We need to get some fresh blood in here.” The AI is likely to underline “fresh blood” and suggest “new employees” instead.

It might underline places where your writing exhibited gender bias. If you tend to say “mailman” or Congressman” in the generic, it might suggest you use “mailperson” or “Congressperson.” If you use the term “gentlemen’s agreement,” it may suggest you use “unspoken agreement” instead.

If you describe someone as a “disabled person” the AI would suggest “person with a disability.” Person-first terminology is preferred because it portrays the person as more important than the disability.

The “inclusiveness” checks are part of a larger group of “Refine My Writing” tools that also include clarity, conciseness, punctuation, and “sensitive geopolitical terms.” For that last one, the AI’s models look for phrases that may be hard to understand by, or that might be offensive to, someone in another country or culture, Microsoft says.

We’re a long way from spell check here, folks.

A new kind of PC for Microsoft

Spelling and grammar checks check the user’s words against a fairly agreed-upon set of spellings or usage rules. Correcting words for their “correctness” in the cultural or political sense seems like a more subjective and slippery exercise. Actually, Microsoft hasn’t completely settled on the full list of correctness checks the AI will run on the text.

For the various new checks, Microsoft assembled a team of linguists and other experts to anticipate the poor word choices people might make, and assemble lists of terms that would work better, Office Intelligence product manager Malavika Rewari tells me. The AI’s training data also includes Wikipedia pages, which are constantly being updated and corrected.

The good news is that just as you can ask Word not to give you grammar suggestions, you can go into the settings and tell it not to monitor the correctness or sensitivity of your words.

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https://www.fastcompany.com/90346224/mic...tically-correct

Note: Strike out courtesy of algernonpj
There is a great deal wrong with this. It will be a default 'feature'. It is an isidious form of brain washing.





Word integrates Microsoft's 'Ideas' to improve your writing with AI smarts
First PowerPoint, then Word... Ideas marches on.
By Mark Hachman
Senior Editor, PCWorld
May 06, 2019 01:22 PM PT

Last year, Microsoft brought artificial intelligence to PowerPoint with Ideas, a tool to suggest improvements to presentations. Now Microsoft is adapting Ideas to Microsoft Word, offering ideas to enhance your writing as well.

Although Word already corrects misspelled words and suggests changes to your grammar, Ideas goes a bit further. Not only does the service summarize the word length and how long it will take to read your document, it also looks more closely at your language, suggesting more appropriate words when appropriate. Ideas also looks at your language to make sure it’s appropriately gender-inclusive. Microsoft announced the changes at its Microsoft Build developer showcase in Seattle on Monday.

Ideas for Word summarizes your document and improves the language.

Ideas continues to evolve how Office taps artificial intelligence and collaboration to improve further. It wasn’t so long ago that Office documents lacked real-time autosaving to OneDrive. Earlier versions of Word included Office Insights, which taps Bing for more context on a given word. Now, Word not only allows real-time collaboration and editing via the cloud, Word’s new Ideas feature will automatically send emails to colleagues asking for assistance.

Mary Votava Sheppard, a senior product marketing manager at Microsoft, explained how. By essentially writing yourself a note, Word will add a note to your To-Do list, assuming you have it enabled. If you “at” someone else—such as writing “@JoeSmith” before a piece of text, Word will send an email to the appropriate person, including the context of the quote, and ask that person to follow up.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3393186/...deas-words.html





Microsoft to Release Version of Word That Makes Your Grammar ‘Politically Correct’
New features will screen out ‘offensive’ language
Paul Joseph Watson | Infowars.com - May 9, 2019

Microsoft is set to release a new version of Word that uses artificial intelligence to make your writing ‘politically correct’.

You know how annoying it is when the iPhone corrects ‘f*cking’ to ‘d*cking’ every time you type out the word? Imagine that for an entire essay.

The new feature, called ‘Ideas in Word’, will recommend ‘sensitive’ phrases like “We need to get some fresh blood in here” be modified so that “fresh blood” becomes “new employees”.

“It might underline places where your writing exhibited gender bias,” reports Fast Company. “If you tend to say “mailman” or Congressman” in the generic, it might suggest you use “mailperson” or “Congressperson.” If you use the term “gentlemen’s agreement,” it may suggest you use “unspoken agreement” instead.”

The term “disabled person” would be replaced with “person with a disability while the new version’s “inclusiveness check” searches for words or phrases that might be “offensive” to someone from another country or culture.

Mark Sullivan, who is a fan of the new features, says he is worried about “unknowingly or accidentally inserting terms or references in my writing that convey value judgements that I don’t really mean” and wants to avoid “writing something that might offend”.

Rumor has it that every new purchase of Word will come with a voucher for a yearly supply of soy lattes from Starbucks.

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https://www.infowars.com/microsoft-to-re...ically-correct/

Quote: Cincinnatus wrote in post #2

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The next step will be to require any such changes upon your documents. After all, the people who are proposing this are smarter, kinder, and far more caring than you are.

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