With every advancement in technology, we get a cacophony of voices telling us how the technology will cost jobs, crash the economy, make us less human, and many such more. When we look back on every such marker of technological progress, we find that the opposite is true. Each time more jobs were created, humankind benefited, and new forms of artistic expression were unlocked.
When Microsoft Word introduced the spellcheck and grammar check in 1983, we rang the death knell of the editor. 40 years later, the number of bad sentences we find in newspapers - online and offline - tell us that the obituaries were premature. In 2009, Grammarly hit the market, moving more people into the editors-are-dead camp. Today, most writing teams don't have copy editors. They rely on Word's Editor and Grammarly to ensure the content is grammatically correct.
The availability of these tools have raised another question - do writers in professions such as product documentation really need to have good grammar skills? What people miss when getting into this argument is that a tool by itself doesn't create skills in a person. They are most effective in the hands of skilled professionals who use them to augment their existing skills and experience. Canva in my hands is as useless as Grammarly in the hands of someone who is not a professional writer. Attempting to be a professional writer without strong grammar and spelling skills is akin to trying to be a taxi driver without knowing how to drive. True, Google Maps and Waze can tell you the fastest way to get there, but you will leave destruction in your wake.
To someone who doesn't understand the English language there is no difference between a bath and a shower, utilize and use, or such as and like. So even in a GPT world, such people will struggle since they will use the wrong words just because their vocabulary is insufficient. For instance, a non-physicist would refer to quantum physics as the laws that guide the movement of small particles. It isn't wrong, but it isn't accurate.
As the leader of a product documentation team, I must insist on hiring people with impeccable writing skills in English. Without that, the team will fail. Not only will the GPTs not give them correct answers, but even in areas such as localization. For instance, while amount and quantity may be synonyms, they have very distinct meanings in Inventory Management. Using them interchangeably will mean requiring human verification of each translation. Whatever savings you thought you would make by getting rid of the copy editor come back in a different form.
So before we make claims about how technology is making basic skills unnecessary, it's important to stop and consider the implications of the decision months and years down the road.
Comments