Go Home, Autocorrect, You’re Drunk

I recently wrote an article on my disdain for Jordan Peterson. (A cathartic exercise, I assure you.) But as I was busy sharpening my polemic, my so-called writing assistant – autocorrect – decided it fancied itself a philosopher, chipping in with some of the most spectacularly unhelpful suggestions I’ve encountered this side of a Facebook comment thread.

Is wrong bad?

In the first instance, autocorrect took issue with my phrasing:

And by wrong, I mean I disagree with him…

This, apparently, was too much for it. The poor dear couldn’t recognise the parallel sentence structure, or the rhetorical flourish at work. No, it suggested replacing wrong with bad. Because why not destroy the symmetry and nuance in one fell swoop?

Obviously, the second wrong is a riff on the first. To replace wrong with bad would be incorrect—wrong, if you will. Some might say bad. But I digress. The point is: the logic holds, and autocorrect’s intervention doesn’t.

Is bad evil?

As if that weren’t enough, round two delivered an even greater affront:

But here’s where my patience truly snaps: Peterson’s prescriptivism. His eagerness to spew what I see as bad ideology dressed up as universal truth…

Autocorrect, in its infinite wisdom, suggested I swap bad for evil. Ah yes, because evil is precisely what I want—a term dripped in moral absolutism and ideological baggage.

First, autocorrect, might I suggest you check out Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Good and Evil before piping up? Perhaps then you’d grasp the not-so-subtle difference between bad and evil—a distinction that, in moral philosophy, rather matters.

And now my book titles aren’t safe either…

Even as I write this post, the machine assaults me with a suggestion to rename the title of my book recommendation. O! the humanity. Is nothing sacred?

Final thoughts

Autocorrect may be marvellous for spotting typos and the occasional rogue comma, but when it tries its hand at philosophy, the result is about as elegant as a rhinoceros in a tutu. Dear autocorrect: stick to spelling. Leave the nuance to the humans.