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It's interesting you say it's good at answering legal questions. I've found it to be especially terrible at it. It tends to make up laws that match its (holy shit, when will autocorrect stop correcting its to it's?) own sense of morality, but that have nothing to do with actually existing laws. It cannot, for instance, tell me what the relevant statute is on something and quote me the relevant sections or point to where I can find the relevant information.
Something else I've recently discovered it's bad at is writing scripts that reformat and process data in Excel sheets. It will easily produce something close to what I want, but then I find it impossible even after an enormous amount of feedback to add a few extra features that it just can't understand even though they're pretty simple and I'm explaining clearly. I'll then discover there is some bug in even the first feature it initially appeared to have easily solved as the occasionally incorrect results will come up.
I've noticed if it doesn't know what the source of a bug is, it will make something up and confidently try something that obviously isn't going to help and it will do that over and over and may even eventually hit on the correct answer - but probably won't - before it gives up.
The best use I've gotten out of it is writing simple code in a language I don't know or doing a simple but tedious reformatting of data.
A lot of people focus on its ability to write, but I don't get this. It's never going to write anything the way you want, and it would take more time to explain what you want it to say and then edit the result than to do it all from scratch.
Oh is that why it seems hardly anyone knows to use "its"? I've always assumed people are just terrible at knowing this, but now I'm wondering how much of it is the use of phone autocorrect these days.
Still doesn't explain people's insistence on using "eg"/"ie" without the proper punctuation and "cf" to mean "see"/"for example". Even Scott is so bad about this; it drives me nuts. Sigh. I'm on a one-man crusade on these, it seems.
That’s almost entirely it in my opinion. But about your second point:
Partially, phones also make typing i.e. incredibly annoying. You have to avoid autocapitalization and also switch back and forth between qwerty and the numerical/symbolic keyboard. And my iPhone at least doesn’t ever autocorrect it to add the periods.
And also, virtually all abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms have had their own periods gradually dropped over the last decades, especially as they proliferate. What might have been the I.A.E.A. in years past is now just the IAEA (though this would depend on the style guide and how close the acronym is to its own word vs. an actual abbreviation). I think the logical conclusion, for the sake of consistency, is that the same should be done for other similar uses.
And if the original phrase is Latin, a language no one speaks, and therefore (almost) practically meaningless? Even less reason to be pedantic.
While iPhones don’t autocorrect “i.e.” and “e.g.” on their own, you can set up text replacements for both if it’s something you care about (I use them often enough that it seemed worthwhile to me). Go to Settings, General, Keyboard, Text Replacement, then enter whatever shortcut you like and the resulting phrase. I have it set up so that “ie” will autocorrect to “i.e.,” (including the comma), and likewise with “eg.” The whole thing takes about a minute for both.
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"IAEA" is just as valid as "I.A.E.A." and "I. A. E. A.", because it is immediately obvious to the reader that any sequence of all-uppercase letters makes up an abbreviation. But "ie" is not just as valid as "i.e." and "i. e.", because the default state of a sequence of all-lowercase letters is an ordinary word, and the reader is forced to fail to parse the entire sequence of letters before realizing that he must go back and reparse it as an abbreviation rather than as a word. (IMO.)
Regarding convenience, on my phone I use a(n unmaintained) nearly-full QWERTY keyboard.
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Maybe. It seems people tend to make every conceivable homonym mistake, so I just assumed the vast majority of the population can barely spell and relies mainly on autocorrect. I don't know how else to explain "payed" instead of "paid", "lead" instead of "led", "loose" instead of "lose", and putting question marks on things that aren't questions.
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