Microsoft Word goes woke: It’ll check ‘bias’ as well as your spelling
MiCrOSOFT Word has added a tool to make sure users are not only grammatically correct but politically correct too.
The ‘inclusiveness checker’ highlights phrases the firm believes could offend someone based on their gender, age, ethnicity or sexual orientation.
The feature, which even looks for ‘socioeconomic bias’, then suggests alternatives deemed to be more woke. Among the suggestions are changing ‘Mrs Thatcher’ to ‘Ms Thatcher’ as the former ‘may imply gender bias’.
it also recommends amending ‘mankind’ in neil Armstrong’s ‘one giant leap for mankind’ to ‘humankind’ or ‘humanity’.
And for Barry Manilow’s song Copacabana, which refers to Lola as a ‘showgirl’, the tool suggests calling her a ‘dancer’ or ‘performer’ instead. Postman Pat, meanwhile, would become ‘Postal Worker Pat’.
Tech giant Microsoft said it did not introduce the checker to correct all of society’s issues but instead to highlight ‘potential blind spots’.
When the artificial intelligencepowered tool was introduced in March 2020, a Microsoft blog post said: ‘Ai has the potential to reinforce harmful biases that exist in society, and in the data that algorithms learn from.’
To address this, Microsoft researchers set up the checker to offer replacement language relating to ‘age, ability, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnic or racial slurs, as well as outdated or sensitive geopolitical references’. inclusiveness issues are given a purple underline – the underline colour is red for spelling mistakes and blue for grammar errors.
The tool is in the latest update to Office 365, a subscription service for software that includes Microsoft Word. it can be turned off in a menu called ‘grammar and refinements’.
Microsoft’s Sumit Chauhan said: ‘in our products, we want to be thoughtful about stereotypes in the world and to make sure our Ai is not reinforcing or amplifying those.’