Thoughtwax

Interesting/worrying interaction just now (maybe that’s all of them nowadays?!) prompted by Claude successfully deciphering a particularly egregious typo of mine. I got curious and followed up:

I messed up typing there pretty bad, and you still got it. Can you explain how that works techniceally? (sic)*

canty orut wlal wehat immethyupgin ievenn if ijmem reasllty rounght about the way that id so it>? foews itnefgvevn makle a diffmnreence to you of can it jiust hammere everything our tlil this? plrewsasre trnadcvribe ejhat you think ie was tying to typoew hjerex

That latter paragraph I typed by hammering on the keyboard as quickly as I could with both meathooks. I took a broad swing at typing the words I was thinking, yes, but only to the extent that a Grade 3 pianist might attempt Flight of the Bumblebee while drunk for fun.

In any case, here is what Claude responded with:

“Can you still read what I’m typing even if I’m really rough about the way that I do it? Does it even make a difference to you or can it just hammer everything out like this? Please transcribe what you think I was trying to type here.”

This was, unsurprisingly/unnervingly (per nowadays), a perfect interpretation of what I’d had mashed upon the keyboard.

I am genuinely not sure what to make of this. Should I now start typing as if I lacked opposable thumbs? Can I start sending emails like this, knowing that some AI-powered Garbled Ramblings Unscrambler on the other end can spellcheck it for me? This seems like it might be bad for global literacy, but also good for my WPM score, so…? Touch typing is now an obsolete skill, I guess. I wonder if chorded keyboards or other input modes are suddenly more viable now? This combined with voice input really changes how we use computers, and probably how we communicate. Must be an interesting time to be a computational linguist!

(* Rest assured the irony of “techniceally,” and indeed its very inclusion in this post, were hotly debated between our in-house Styleguide and Editorial departments.)