Taking the BS Out of AI (Premium)

AI—and AI-adjacent terms like “machine learning”—is perhaps the most-overused personal technology term of 2018. But don’t let the marketing abuse get to you. AI is indeed transforming the products and services we use every day. And its use is only going to escalate.

That said, I understand the AI cynicism. I am the original cynic, after all. And we’d never be sober if we played a drinking game that was based on the use of the term AI in industry events, press releases, or blog posts. Companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft are pushing the “AI-ness” of every product and service they offer. And it’s obvious that, within Microsoft at least, being able to tie an advance to AI is the only way to ensure that it makes its way to the public.

Cynicism is one thing. But one can look objectively at the improvements that Microsoft and the others are making to their offerings and at least come to grips with the fact that meaningful improvements are being made. They may not be AI-based in all cases. But they are still very real and very useful.

Also, this kind of thing isn’t new.

Consider the spell-checking functionality that Microsoft and other software makers first added to word processing applications decades ago. This was not an early form of AI, as Microsoft now claims. Instead, Word and other word processors shipped with a hard-coded dictionary of terms and would match the spelling of typed words against it. This functionality is not AI because it couldn’t learn. It could improve, but only manually as the user added new words to the dictionary. But those improvements never filtered back to the product, and they couldn’t make the word processor better on the user’s other PCs, let alone PCs used by others.

Grammar checking, likewise, isn’t really AI. It is far more advanced than spell-checking, of course, because a grammar checker needs to understand context. It’s not just comparing words against a known-good list. But grammar checkers don’t learn. They can only be told to ignore certain rules, or instances of incorrect grammar, that it thinks are correct.

Flash forward to 2018 and Microsoft is promoting AI everywhere. Let’s stick with word processing. Here are a couple of good examples.

Today, Microsoft Word expands on spell- and grammar checking and offers more advanced proofing tools which are, if not AI in the strictest sense, are at least smart and connected. These features make Word better for any user—well, any Office 365 subscriber, I guess—and provide Microsoft with a meaningful differentiator for anyone who’s cross-shopping with Google Docs, Apple Pages, or any other word processor.

According to Microsoft, the Word editor uses intelligent cloud services to enhance the capabilities of the product’s spell- and grammar checking, bringing these features into the 21st century. But it also examines more subtle aspects of a document, including the writing style, and makes suggestions to improve your writing. As with other proofing functionality, it can make some changes for you automatically. Or provide visual cues—like those squigglies under words—so you can examine further and take action if needed.

So. Is this AI? Perhaps only in the loosest possible term. I don’t feel like Word’s editor “learns” as you write, for example. But the back-end services it utilizes are improving and making the editor smarter as they do. And some of those services absolutely do “learn” as we understand the term.

More recently, Microsoft also pointed out how it is using AI to enhance Word with automatically collect “to-do” placeholders in a document into a list. Now that sounds smart: Writers often leave little “to-do’s” in documents as they go so that they can come back later and fill in a detail they need to research. But it’s not AI.

Not yet, anyway. But Microsoft has plans to improve this placeholders feature in a way that would meet the AI definition.

“Over time, Office will use AI to help fill in many of these placeholders,” Microsoft’s Jared Spataro explained in the original post describing this feature. “In the next few months, Word will use Microsoft Search to suggest content for a to-do like <<insert chart of quarterly sales figures>>. You will be able to pick from the results and insert content from another document with a single click.”

This functionality will take advantage of Microsoft’s core AI engine, of sorts, called Microsoft Graph. Like grammar checking, it must understand context to work correctly. But this is—or will be—a much more advanced understanding of context, as the Graph is examining all of your work-based documents, communications, and other data to draw inferences and make connections. So while you may not know what the latest quarterly sales figures were, or whatever, that data is in your other documents somewhere. And the Microsoft Graph can use its understanding of this data to find it for Microsoft Word, which will insert it automatically into the document for you.

That’s the theory, at least. Right now, this functionality is more dream than reality. And that gives the AI cynics some fuel for their complaints.

But I think this is the missing the point. If a corporation is trying to choose between, say, Microsoft Office and G Suite—again, to kind of stick with the word processing theme—what they’re looking for is a cohesive set of functionality that spans the products they’ll be using and makes their employees more efficient. The features I mentioned above may or may not be AI-based. But they absolutely will make employees more efficient.

And that’s why Microsoft—and others—are pushing AI so hard. AI doesn’t just sound smart and futuristic, it is smart and futuristic. And when you’re angling for an advantage, you’re going to choose the smartest solutions. AI is just a shorthand way of saying that.

So I’ll try to grin and bear it at Microsoft’s every utterance of “AI,” just as I do so whenever I hear the word “ironic” used incorrectly (which is always). It’s hard being this pedantic. But the improvements we’re seeing now in software and services—even in legacy, decades-old solutions like Microsoft Word—are truly exciting. Exciting enough to make even a cynic like myself back off a bit.