alt Hacker NewsAI can’t really spell check without risking changing the meaning of sentences. Spell checking was a solved problem before this.
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If it's a solved problem, then why does my iPhone suck at it?
Only if the problem is declared to be whatever it is that spell checkers solve. As the classic joke goes, "Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken."
Strong disagree. One of the core strengths of LLMs from the beginning is that they are very good at NOT changing meaning, as long as your model isn't so small that it starts to get "dumb" and as long as your input fits in the context window. (Two known limitations that aren't always exposed to the end user in poorly-written applications.)
Of course, LLMs are non-deterministic and do occasionally make mistakes, so you have to use them correctly and review their output. You shouldn't paste a doc into the web UI and tell it "fix all the mistakes and write the output to a new file." You should instead have it present each mistake and fix to the user as a diff and let the user approve or deny, either within the application or allowing the user to make their own edits. Never let it "rewrite" the whole document, that's the document-editing equivalent of giving OpenClaw root on your personal computer. Nothing good will come of it.
Classic spell checkers can't detect homophones. E.g. "there" and "their." Grammar checkers can, but at least the ones that I have used also like to change the tone of my writing to sterile corporate PC speak. LLMs used for grammar checking have not, in my experience, meddled with my tone. (Although sometimes they try to admonish me for it!)
Spellchecking is absolutely not a solved problem. I immediately disable spellchecking on every avenue it tries to approach because managing a bunch of dictionaries on every browser/device/application that has its own spellchecker for some godforsaken reason to not have squigglies spammed over every piece of jargon, slang, and slightly atypical spelling is incredibly annoying. I don't know how effective LLMs are, but it's difficult to imagine they can be worse than the existing regime, which is embarrassingly bad for the decades it's been around.