Eye halve a spelling check her, / It came with my pea sea. / It plane lee marks four my revue / Miss steaks aye kin knot sea.

                Writing on computers, when compared to pen and paper, has many distinct advantages. Computers don’t require reams of paper or packs of pens, word processors make it easy to delete or move large sections of text, and a practiced typist can create paragraphs in mere minutes. Another benefit of computer writing is access to spellcheckers, programs that can scan and correct faulty spelling and grammar, but these are often the subjects of controversy. The poem above, an excerpt from Ode to a Spell Checker by Jerrold H. Zar, was written in 1992 in order to show how the spellcheckers of the time failed to analyze words in context, and therefore missed many errors a human editor would catch instantly. Today, the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) spellcheckers is a commonly discussed topic among tutors and teachers, alongside concerns regarding how students perceive and use them. This paper seeks to look at the past, present of future of spellcheckers with the goal of shedding light on their many strengths and weaknesses.

                The first spellchecker program was created by Stanford computer scientist Ralph Gorin in February 1971, and was known simply as SPELL. Publicly accessible and distributed worldwide, SPELL was originally designed for the Digital Equipment Corporation’s PDP-10, an early line of mainframe computers, and could recognize and offer alternative spellings for roughly 10,000 English words. Several systems improved on SPELL over the next three decades, notably Unix’s Ispell— used as a base to form the first non-English spellcheckers— and the SourceGear Corporation’s AbiWord. The next major development occurred in 2001 when Apple released the first operating system with a built-in spellchecker, Mac OS; this development meant that users didn’t have to install individual spellcheckers for each program that required them. Most modern word processors come with their own spellcheckers, but they are much more advanced than their predecessors.

                One advancement of these spellcheckers that delights (and often frustrates) users is autocorrect. Wired writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus, after interviewing Microsoft’s Dean Hachamovitch, notes this of its incorporation into Microsoft Word in 1993: “His aha moment came when he realized that, because English words are space-delineated, the space bar itself could trigger the replacement, to make the correction... automatic!” This epiphany led to the development of many of autocorrection’s modern functions, including those of fixing spelling, capitalization, and repeated words. However, Hachamovitch and his team ran into a myriad of problems when it came to implementing this novel function. What does one properly check homophones? Acronyms? Curse words? In the early nineties, the best solution was to have the interns compile a giant list of corrections, but nowadays a new tool is taking over— AI.

                AI-based spellcheckers use neural networks to catch spelling and grammar mistakes without the need for a human to manually input every term that could appear. The way it works is that a computer program is given a corpus of proper writing to draw from, and generates guesses based on those examples as to whether a certain word, phrase, or sentence is correct. Eventually the program is capable of drawing from its own prior conclusions, and its guesses become more and more accurate until it’s viable as a spellchecker. One AI-based spellchecker, WProofreader, even uses three stages of this training, starting with basic syntactic data and moving towards complex grammar issues— this results in proofreading that is, according to their blog, three times more accurate than their human-compiled program. In addition, these models also make it more feasible to create spellcheckers for different languages, with current research focusing on various Romance and Germanic dialects. Through these advancements and others, the future of the technology is bound to be more accurate for languages around the globe.

                However, with modern spellcheckers comes modern problems. AI, moreso than previous technologies, has a futuristic feel; it’s still new, and it’s capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses haven’t been fully explored. Older tools like dictionaries and autocorrect are seen as just that— tools, which are supplemental to the human writing process. AI, with its generative capacities, feels more like a writer in it of itself. This is likely a big draw for students, who are both required to do a large amount of writing and are more inclined towards technology. The online blog and gig site JobsForEditors, in their article Pros and Cons of Spell Checkers, writes this of how writers interact with different tools: “Writers had to write perfectly on a typewriter, or else they would have to rewrite a text. However, with a spell checker, one writes without any thought of spelling and word usage correctness.” Written in 2018, this article predates the debate over AI in educational politics, but it’s only become move relevant over time. Tools like ChatGPT cut the writer out of the writing process almost entirely, and promote the “right answer” over the journey of thought and effort central to finding it. That’s assuming these technologies work perfectly, as well; while they certainly are a far stretch from SPELL, they aren’t always correct, and cannot produce original ideas.

                That isn’t to say that the answer is to throw our computers into the sea and dust off our parents’ typewriters, though. Like dictionaries and autocorrect, AI spellcheckers are amazing tools when used in conjunction with human brainpower. It’s imperative that we improve alongside our technologies rather than allow ourselves to be led by them. Ode to a Spell Checker concludes with, “Sow glad eye yam that aye did bye / This soft wear four pea seas.” Spellcheckers, with all their faults, are incredible technological achievements that are only available thanks to decades of effort. Their continuing existence, more than anything, belies the necessity of proper writing.