Opinion | Dictionaries Are Better Than Artificial Intelligence - The New York Times

Have you ever obeyed the suggestions of a digital writing assistant to replace a word or restructure a sentence without knowing how, why or even if it made your writing better? Before the reign of digital tools, you’d probably have turned to a dictionary for the same assistance. Our parents and grandparents picked up a heavy book and looked up what words meant, how they’re used, maybe glanced at their etymology — and then made a linguistic choice, however shaky or idiosyncratic, to express their ideas. In today’s universe of spell-check, autocorrect and artificial intelligence — each of which is capable of making those choices for us — why should we keep producing and owning actual, cinder-block-sized dictionaries? Because dictionaries enable us to write not with fail-safe convenience but with originality and a point of view. While A.I. assistants manufacture phrases and statements so writers don’t have to think them up, dictionaries provide us with the knowledge to use language oursel

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• Hemanth Surya Ganesh Kapa