Don’t Let Microsoft’s New Copilot Take the Controls of Your Writing Journey!
Send this AI “helper” to the baggage compartment where it belongs.
I confess. I am among the old-school, curmudgeonly writers increasingly disturbed by artificial intelligence's gradual, persistent encroachment into the experience, technology, and day-to-day business of writing.
This is why I was very disturbed this morning to find a new AI widget attached to my cursor on Microsoft Word, doggedly beckoning me to use the new Copilot AI engine to complete my writing project instead of my own brain.
I cannot be alone in feeling that the rich diversity of human expression that was once disseminated and preserved in the written word (and which is essential to the nourishment of the human spirit) is being systematically homogenized and drained of vitality by the “helpful”, real-time AI-driven grammatical notifications that now flash on our screens while we are typing.
Admittedly, I’m a word-processing dinosaur. My first word-processing program was Newscript, which I happily typed on a RadioShack TRS-80 that used a black and white TV as a monitor and audio cassettes for memory storage. Then came WordStar (on my beloved TRS 80 Model 4) and WordPerfect 2.0 (on a succession of DOS desktops). None of these programs had any grammar or spell-check…
