DeepL Write working on an excerpt from Richard Wagner's My Life / The Project Gutenberg
Today is World Handwriting Day. You know there's a day for just about anything you can imagine. Well, this day, which has been celebrated since 1977, aims to remind us that writing by hand promotes creativity and is beneficial for cognitive development and motor skills and contributes to improving our reading comprehension.
The date was chosen by the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association (WIMA) to coincide with the anniversary of the birth of John Hancock (1737), known for being the first signer of the Declaration of Independence of the United States.
It cannot be overlooked that this association has a clear commercial interest in keeping us writing by hand.
This association brings together various manufacturers of pens, markers, brushes, pencils, crayons, wax crayons and other writing and drawing implements. In their plea they appeal to our feelings, trying to touch our heartstrings a little bit:
"Although computers and e-mail play an important role in our lives, nothing will ever replace the sincerity and individualism expressed through the handwritten word."
David H. Baker, WIMA
Be that as it may, it is true that we are writing less and less by hand. That is, using traditional analogue tools. We rarely use anything other than a keyboard or voice messages, and this has also meant that our handwriting is becoming less and less legible. After all, each letter is a drawing and drawing, like many other skills, atrophies due to lack of practice.
This introductory note is nothing more than a filler excuse to point out that not everything in writing is harmful and, incidentally, to outline a use of artificial intelligence applied to writing that seems reasonable to me among so many rubbishy applications that are being given to the different AIs, such as the replagiarisation of a thousand styles to offer graphic monstrosities with two hundred teeth and fifty fingers or chats that return texts for slave-feeding scribblers.
The folks at DeepL, creators of what I consider to be the best online translator, launched DeepL Write last week. It's an AI writing tool aimed at improving your written expression which, obviously, I understand, will be powered by its own proprietary algorithm with convolutional neural networks trained on the Linguee database. At the moment it is only available in English and German and is still in beta version, but it is already available for free to anyone who wants to try it out.
DeepL Write is a proposal that goes beyond a simple grammar checker. The tool suggests improvements in syntax, tone, style and terminology. In addition, its options and suggestions are designed to improve your texts while maintaining your personal style and perfecting terminology and phraseology.
What I like about this proposal is that the AI application is not so intrusive and presents itself more as a stimulus for creativity and learning by offering suggestions for words, phrases and rephrasings that can serve as inspiration to rethink the structure of your texts. Although I am also sure that it will end up being used to copy other people's texts and give them a quick "wash" to disguise the plagiarism.
Knowing how the translator works, which even allows you to save your own glossary, we will have to keep an eye on its development because I am sure that as they perfect the tool and add new languages and functions, it could become a resource to be taken into account for all types of writers.
