AI In the Apps: Microsoft's Editor
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my
book?
It took me years to write, will you take a look?
It's based
on a novel by a man named Lear
And I need a job, so I want to be a
paperback writer
— Paperback Writer, The Beatles
While we all wait for our CoPilot AI to arrive on our Word Ribbon, we have the Editor.
The Editor is an
AI
writing tool
available by default in Word and Outlook. The Editor is turned on and off by
the Ribbon
button that resembles a quill, or maybe a
pencil marking up a paper.
Microsoft offers plug-ins for Edge and Chrome to place the Editor in your Gmail or other web based email. For our purposes, however, we will look at The Editor as a writing tool within that greatest of modern day writing tools: Microsoft Word.
This post is not intended to be a complete tutorial on the Editor.
The Microsoft page on the Editor is here. That
said, here are one fact and one crucial tip for its use.
Verify the Editor is
enabled in Word.
Fact: The version of the Editor reviewed
herein is an exclusive feature of Office 365. Microsoft
calls the Editor only one of several "connected
experiences designed to enable you to create, communicate, and
collaborate more effectively."
Tip: To ensure that the Editor is set to offer all of
its editor features follow the steps below and the image to the right.
In Word click File → Options.
From the Options menu,
click Proofing.
Scroll down to Writing Style.
Then select Grammar and Refinements.
The
Settings button opens up every possible editing setting and can be
confusing.
The Premium version of Editor that comes standard with a Microsoft (Office) 365 subscription is an AI that will check the written prose for errors and make recommendations in these areas noted to the left. The standalone spelling and grammar checker only is available as a free download.
Rather than bore my readers with an AI thrashing of my prose, I thought we might take the Editor out for a spin and run it against what is considered one of the finest pieces of prose in our American or any history: Abrahams Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
One of the ironies of history is that Abraham Lincoln was not the keynote speaker that day. Our 16th President was preceded at the podium by noted orator of the day, Evert Horton, who spoke for over 2 hours. Although Horton's text is preserved at the University of Maryland's U.S. Oratory Project, History better records only the text of Abraham Lincoln's eloquent 268 words.
The Text and the Editor's rating of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address below.
Lincoln is quite the wordsmith, according to the Editor.
Nonetheless, I have
outlined the three criticisms the Editor made about The Gettysburg
Address.
The first criticism reflects one of the limitations of AI, in that it
has within it a bias towards modern thinking. "All
men
are created equal" many thought was a radical statement in
November of 1863, but now
we consider that statement somewhat regressive, with "all people are created" a
more "Inclusive" manner of speaking. No matter
the style of writing chosen for evaluation, the Editor gave Abe red
checks for this lack of inclusion.
Since we are not writing a resume, we can ignore that suggestion. I
don't know if I agree or disagree that "part" conveys better clarity
than "portion," but I am just the reporter here.
So, what about my prose? I took a passage from this essay that I had not yet reviewed for errors. The Editor did find several punctuations errors, and a couple of plain non-sequiturs. I agreed with the Editor’s suggestions. Made the changes and was rewarded for my hard work. I gave myself the gold star.
Our little exercise here points out some overarching facts about AI and its many uses. AI is primarily a tool. Like a wrench, a hammer, or a large clump of dried wood, the tool is inanimate. Whether the use of the tool is benign or malevolent is dependent upon the intentions of the human wielding the tool. In this instance, I used the tool for its intended purpose. The result was, therefore, in line with expectations.
The second lesson we can take away is that Artificial Intelligence — the Large Language Models (LLM)s — are of our time. The LLMs have been trained on the lexicon of our day. The results from the LLM here prove that fact. Its biases were clear, but also those biases were directed in a positive manner. From this we can extrapolate that other biases inherent in the LLMs language datasets could result in undesirable outcomes. And thus points out the need for some form of regulation of the AI.
At first, I was quite skeptical about using the Editor myself as a tool for better writing. I felt that all the prose would come out sounding the same. Now, however, rather than pouring over each paragraph of this blog looking for errors, I will simply copy and paste passages into Word, let the Editor proof the text, and then carefully copy and paste that into the HTML editor, less all the horrible code that Word puts into a HTML document.
Anyone who writes knows the author of the piece is the worst editor for the piece. We authors already know what we are saying. The trick to good writing is to convey those same thoughts and ideas to a wide audience in such a manner that they too can understand the prose. Microsoft's Editor is a good tool to help accomplish that task.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Gerald Reiff