In addition to posting my Hallelujah essay on Mastodon yesterday, I also sent it to a mailing list of an organization I'm a member of. Almost immediately I heard from another member (a professional book author, no less) of a typo: "If it's not too late to make this change on Mastodon, the phrase you have in mind is a secret chord [not cord]." Oops! I thanked him, then added a short addendum to what I posted. Later, re-reading what I wrote, I found that I also wrote "songs to be song" instead of "sung". Oh, no! Two obvious mistakes.

When I used to write essays for my website (www.bricklin.com) a couple of decades ago, I often had a co-worker or friend proofread and give me edit suggestions. I miss that.

Microsoft Word had ensured that I caught my misspellings, but it did not catch obvious errors in the meaning.

Then I thought: Maybe with the new AI systems, we'll get that extra. I should try ChatGPT, which I had not been trying yet. Now it was time.

I played around a bit with "Find typos in this sentence: The quick brwn fix jumped over the lazy dogggies back." It found the misspellings but not the inappropriate "fix". "The rain in spain falls mainly in the plane." - "No typos found."

Maybe I should try a better prompt: "What's the next word after: The rain in spain falls mainly in the" - "plain". Good!

"Find the error: The Beatles wrote lots of songs. They wanted to hold my arm." It responded: "Hold my arm should be hold my hand." Wow! Maybe it could help me.

I then tried "Find the errors:" on one line, and then gave the context of the entire CORRECTED content of my Hallelujah piece. The response:

The reaction seems to be a thoughtful and well-articulated one, and I couldn't find any errors in it. The engineer provides their perspective on the first verse of the song "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen, drawing on their experience as a product creator and their love for music. The engineer seems to have a deep understanding of the song and its meaning, and the language used is clear and concise. Overall, the reaction seems to be a strong piece of writing.

Hmm. That was nice. I'll take the compliments.

Next, I tried with the original two mistakes in a new chat. Correctly spelled words, but obviously incorrect meaning even if you did not have access to the lyrics online (they are from before 2021 like the Beatles so they are). The response:

There are no errors in the text provided.

Missed the errors. Not as friendly. I tried "Are there any incorrect words? " - "No, there are no incorrect words in the text."

Oh, well. Not yet. (Of course, I assume what I write here is now a bug report and it will do better at some point in the near future. We'll see.)