alt Hacker News>Only if the problem is declared to be whatever it is that spell checkers solve.
The problem being misspelling, hence, "spell checker". Like, this seems pretty straightforward? Grammar checking if you cannot use the language properly is a pretty different problem space, and indeed has long existed and is exposed as a separate thing. And not just in fancy word processors either, if you go to something as simple as macOS TextEdit you'll see separate check boxes for "Check spelling as you type" vs "Check grammar with spelling". If someone wants to try out using LLMs for grammar no problem, but spell checking is purely about the mechanical and, importantly, deterministic aspect of typos or outright non-words.
>As the classic joke goes, "Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken."
There is a genuine touch of irony/meta in you using that here in this context. That sentence has no misspelled words, and importantly gets across the exact humorous meaning the human who wrote it intended. The joke literally only works because a human was able to make creative use of language. If you had an LLM agent posting for you to HN and it automatically changed that to:
>As the classic joke goes, "My spellchecker works great but could use some grammar checking."
Well, where would the joke be now!? This goes to the exact concern people have with powerful non-deterministic meaning-changing tools replacing deterministic meaning-preserving ones.
Replies
It's not clear whether using "grate" instead of "great" is a grammar mistake or a spelling mistake. I'd argue it's a spelling mistake. The intent was not "my spell checker works a frame of metal bars," it was "my spell checker works well." It just so happens that the misspelled word matches a different word.
An example of a sentence like this with correct spelling but bad grammar would be "my spell checker works good." All of the words are what they're meant to be, but the last word is not the correct part of speech.=
But because computers are good at detecting "this doesn't match any known word" and bad at detecting "this matches a word but isn't the word you meant to use here," we've redefined "spell checking" to mean "find words that don't match any known word."
Your point about the joke is not correct. If I put my comment into ChatGPT and ask for a grammar check, it recognizes that it's a joke with deliberately bad grammar and suggests leaving it alone. If I put my comment into a grammar checker, it flags multiple errors in the joke. And "deterministic meaning-preserving ones"? Traditional spell/grammar checkers may be deterministic, but at no point have they ever been guaranteed to preserve meaning, or even been particularly good at it.
I just fed this entire thread (excluding your comment pointing out the joke, and the text mentioning that it was a joke) to an LLM, and it did better than the dictionary spellchecker: corrected one real error, left my "squigglies" alone which was attacked by squigglies with the old-hat spellchecker, and specifically noted, without any prompting in that direction, that it left the joke spelling unchanged. It did not rewrite any sentences. I'm all for determinism where deterministic tools work, but the current implementations are so bad I can't blame people for turning to a non-deterministic program if it's still better on average.