I see a lot of memes on Facebook that get people to complete sentences with predictive text and it’s always interesting to me how different the responses are. Some of them are great, and some are terrible and make no sense. For this week’s task, I used the prompt “Every time I think about our future.”
Every time I think about our future plans for a new job I have to worry about you doing this for me and it’s not worth it. The waiter has always been friendly and attentive to us ????????. Oh yeah I know I’m going through a lot of stuff. ????
I let myself choose from one of the three options presented to me for each word. I also decided to do more than more sentence to try and max out the characters to get more of an idea of what the generated text would say. The US flag showed up as a suggestion and the crystal ball was the first emoji suggested when I searched “future”. I got the sponge bob image from the gif library looking up “waiter.”
Q: In what textual products have you read statements like the one you generated?
A: I see statements like this mostly on people’s Facebook statuses. The statement is one of a highly personal nature and slightly irrational, without a lot of sense.
Q: How are these generated statements different from how you would normally express yourself and/or your opinions on the matter you wrote about?
A: If I have a major decision to make that’s between my husband and I, I don’t discuss it on the internet. If I really want outside perspective on it. I talk to people that I trust. The internet it polarizing and random strangers wouldn’t have all the details to make a balanced, informed opinion. I also don’t announce to the world if I’m going through a difficult time. I often try to think about what my professional circle would think about what I’m posting or how I’m responding. My humour isn’t always professional though, but I do need some fun in life.
Q: Did the statement you generated speak in your “voice”—did it sound like you? Why or why not?
A: I don’t think this sounds like me at all. It’s irrational, emotional and cryptic. I might have posted like this when I was 15, but there’s a reason why I nuked all my teenage blogs. If a juvie record gets erased when turning of age, I feel like my online presence deserves the same reset.
At this point, it’s hard to see how predictive text algorithms can apply in professional and educational settings. I have only seen it work in humour contexts and I don’t think it’s good enough for much else. Of course this can change in the future; I though YouTube was pointless when it came out and boy was I wrong!