Artificial Ignorance: Spellcheck is My Enemy

I never wrote "Jennings." (Three stories of words "Algo" tried to sabotage.)

Last night, when I posted this, I corrected it over and over, it tried to change every “Jennings” to Jennens. I just felt it like a panic: “I bet it says Jennings,” and I went and checked, first thing this morning, and sure enough. In the headline.

Why, I do not know.

Or maybe I do.

Is the algorithm so advanced in its atheistic ideation that it springs to life to faintly sabotage all people of faith through history when you try to type their name?

We’d be amazed.

And why doesn’t it ever turn up when I need help spelling bureaucracy?

Two stories about the embedded enemy algorithm and its allergy to certain words:

Once was around 2016 or so. My friend Sal wrote me that he was typing “Jesus” in a sentence and the spellcheck asked, set off by the “Je….”

“Do you mean Jessica?”

I thought it was laughingly funny despite being creepy and infuriating, in its way.

Now I’m not laughing at all anymore.

Back in October, I was at a hotel in Delaware, prior to a presentation. I came home the evening before the talk and I was locked out of my room. I went to the reception desk. I was told I had not paid. “I have,” I said. I had extended my reservation from the previous night, via “Hotels.com,” and paid. But apparently I’d paid for a different night than the upcoming one.

They would not permit me to go to my room to resolve it on my laptop. (I should recall the name of this hotel so none of you ever go there.)

I allowed myself a rare bit of public anger. I said with a louder than usual voice. “You’re not acting as somebody who works in the hospitality industry!” I had been there for a few nights, and was fully paid up and had caused them no problems.

At that, she permitted another employee to escort me to my room to grab my laptop. Escorted and watched, like a prisoner. I had offered to just pay again and get reimbursed later but that too was not permitted by the great machine.

(In Spain, by the way: No hotel “deposit,” and you pay when you check out, period.)

I would spend the next 3 hours in the lobby waiting for this algorithm tangle to be resolved.

I got to interact with either a person or a robot on Hotels.com’s “chat.” I think it was a person. I explained my problem. The entity said he or she would attend to it, call the hotel and set it right.

I tried to type “God bless you.”

It turned up on the screen like this:

”*** bless you.”

I tried again, a little later in the exchange.

Same thing.

This is very serious, friends.

“God” is a forbidden word on a major hotel booking site!

I took a photo:

Anyway, thank you for not unsubscribing upon seeing such a mangled spelling of the librettist for Handel’s Messiah.

In the future, it could be the algorithm, (“Algo” I call it) or it could be me.