Actor and equality campaigner Geena Davis has announced that Disney has adopted a digital tool that will analyse scripts and identify opportunities to rectify any gender and ethnic biases. Davis, founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, was speaking at the Power of Inclusion event in New Zealand, where she outlined the development of GD-IQ: Spellcheck for Bias, a machine learning tool described as "an intervention tool to infuse diversity and inclusion in entertainment and media". Developed by the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, the Spellcheck for Bias is designed to analyse a script and determine the percentages of characters' "gender, race, LGBTQIA [and] disabilities". It can also track the percentage of "non-gender-defined speaking characters". Davis said that Disney had partnered with her institute to pilot the project: "We're going to collaborate with Disney over the next year using this tool to help their decision-making [and] identify opportunities to increase diversity and inclusion in the manuscripts that they receive. We're very excited about the possibilities with this new technology and we encourage everybody to get in touch with us and give it a try."

Tony has worked in the same automotive plant in north-west Ohio, US, for nearly two decades. During that time, he moved from a part-time line associate on the third shift to a line supervisor, where he now oversees 35 general assembly workers. Occasionally, one of his workers will come to him with an article about a nearby Indiana plant that plans full automation, and ask Tony if robots will take their jobs as well. Fortunately, Tony knows the numbers. The International Federation of Robotics projects 250,000 industrial robots will be deployed globally every year.

US Internet giant Google has said its artificial intelligence (AI)-based grammar checker, corporate web tools and services are available for all users of G Suite, to help them improve writing. Unlike standard spellcheck in Google Docs, Google applies Machine Learning technology to grammar checker as one of the AI tools that can let software understand complex grammar rules and identify any "tricky" grammatical errors by users in writing, Xinhua news agency reported. "Using machine translation, we are able to recognize errors and suggest corrections as work is getting done," G Suite product manager Vishnu Sivaji said in a statement on Tuesday. He said that G Suite customers will see inline, contextual grammar suggestions in their documents as they type, just like spellcheck. "If you've made a grammar mistake, a squiggly blue line will appear under the phrase as you write it," Sivaji added.

Natural language processing (NLP) is the branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that deals with communication: How can a computer be programmed to understand, process, and generate language just like a person? While the term originally referred to a system's ability to read, it's since become a colloquialism for all computational linguistics. Subcategories include natural language generation (NLG) -- a computer's ability to create communication of its own -- and natural language understanding (NLU) -- the ability to understand slang, mispronunciations, misspellings, and other variants in language. Natural language processing works through machine learning (ML). Machine learning systems store words and the ways they come together just like any other form of data.

No, AI probably won't be put to use making sure you spell "adjudicate" correctly, or don't confuse they're and there. But it could turn into the sort of highly-integrated, barely-noticed, and pretty-much-essential technology that spellcheck has become. As legal tech enthusiasts gathered in "Washington, D.C.-adjacent" National Harbor Maryland this week, Microsystems CEO Stacy Kacek acknowledged that AI's uses in "real-world applications" are "still pretty limited," Legaltech News' Ian Lopez reports. But the technology could find itself highly integrated into your practice sooner or later, in subtle ways -- soon becoming as ubiquitous as spellcheck has become. David Cook, Microsystems' VP of product development, asked attorneys to imagine what would happen if they got rid of spellcheck throughout their practice.

AI experts believe that computers will write as well as humans within the next 15 years. This means that any student will be able to input a poorly-written essay into a software program, which will analyze the text and reconstruct it as well-written, grammatically correct text. Since we use calculators as an extension of our minds, shouldn't we also use AI software to become better writers? This is not a hypothetical question. Across the world, teams of computer scientists are racing at a breakneck speed to construct advanced artificial intelligence that can automate thinking and writing. Last month, AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence program created by Google, beat the world-champion Lee Sodel in Go, a game that is so complex that there are more choices available in a single game than there are atoms in the entire universe.