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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

For me it threatens to be like a spell check. Back 20 years ago when I was still in school and still hand writing for many assignments, my spelling was very good.

Nowadays it's been a long time since my brain totally checked out on spelling. Everything I write in every case has spell check, so why waste neurons on spelling?

I fear the same will happen on a much broader level with AI.

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What? Who is spending any brain cycles on spelling? When you write a word, you just write the word, the spelling is... intrinsic? automatic? certainly not something that you have to, like, actively think about?

... until spellcheck gets "AI," and starts turning correctly-spelled words into different words that it thinks are more likely. (Don't get me started on "its" vs. "it's," which autocorrect frequently randomly incorrects.)

I both agree and disagree, I don't regularly think about spelling, but there are certain words I know my brain always gets wrong, so when I run into one of those, things come crashing to a halt for a second while I try to remember if I'm still spelling them wrong or if I've finally trained myself to do it correctly.

I experience the same but I've always been an extremely strong speller. I think it's a biased viewpoint. I remember the kids in grade school who really struggled, and I've always wondered how that same group fares these days with autocorrect: if they pick up the correct spelling through repeat exposure or the opposite is true and they end up relying on autocorrect.

I don't know of any of the research, but I suspect that teaching reading via "sight reading" over phonics is heavily detrimental to developing an intrinsic automatic sense of spelling.

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