Elon Musk rages as Microsoft Word ‘scolds’ him for not using inclusive language
Elon Musk on Tesla Cybertruck
Elon Musk has taken to X, formerly Twitter, to lambast Microsoft Word after it “scolded” him for trying to use a word that it deemed wasn’t “inclusive” enough. Posting on the social network that he bought for $43 billion (£34bn), Musk shared the warning that appeared when he typed “insane” into a document about the forthcoming Tesla Cybertruck.
“Microsoft Word now scolds you if you use words that aren’t ‘inclusive’!” the SpaceX boss tweeted. At the time of writing, 119,000 users have favourited the post on X.
Microsoft Word flagged the word due to “inclusiveness”, adding “this term implies mental health bias.”
It appears the 52-year-old multibillionaire was writing a document about the latest vehicle from Tesla, another company where Musk serves as CEO. He used the word “insane” to describe the stability of the all-electric vehicle, which starts from $79,990 (£66,000).
And this too! pic.twitter.com/03ZbwFu4NE
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 15, 2023
In another tweet, Musk shared a pop-up that appeared when he tried to type in a measurement in pounds, warning him to “consider a different perspective” before converting the weight into kilograms.
A flurry of support for Musk followed the tweet, with other users sharing the PayPal co-founder's assessment of the suggestions in Microsoft Word.
“We are doomed,” one posted, while another followed up with: “That’s honestly very creepy that Microsoft is basically monitoring your documents like that...”
“They really putting the Soft in Microsoft,” one user on X.com joked, while another added: “This is why I tell people to turn off Grammarly and all other writing apps...”
The suggestions around inclusive language and weight measurements come courtesy of Microsoft Editor, which is included as part of the Microsoft 365 subscription.
According to Microsoft, this feature “is an AI-powered service that helps bring out your best writer in more than 20 languages, whether you are writing a Word doc, composing an email message, or posting on a website like LinkedIn or Facebook.”
As well as correcting spelling errors – something that Microsoft Word has done for decades – it'll make suggestions to improve clarity, concision, and grammar. It can also offer tips around formality, so you can tweak the tone of your language with a few clicks.
Microsoft Editor, shown in-action above, offers more than just spelling and grammatical checks, rewriting parts of your document using AI to make sentences more concise, change the formality of the language ...and even suggest alternative words based on inclusiveness
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Grammarly is a third-party alternative that can check spelling, tweak grammatical errors, and re-write your text to make this more concise and either more or less formal.
Even with theMicrosoft Editor feature enabled, Word users can still dismiss these warnings – a prompt that can be seen in the screenshot. To see these pop-ups in his document, Elon Musk is most likely using Microsoft Word as part of a Microsoft 365 subscription.