Why the National Spelling Bee is more vital than ever in the age of AI

a question I encounter all the time when I tell people I have a professional spelling tutor is, “Why bother with spelling bees when we have spell check?” It’s an extremely understandable reaction, especially when it comes from people who have never looked at a bee before. Mobile phones and computers have no problem storing the entire corpus of the English dictionary and accessing it at a moment’s notice. As with all games and sports, spelling bees are not strictly necessary usable – at least not in an immediately practical way. Yet questions about the usefulness of spelling bees (or lack thereof) ignore what makes them so beloved – why it broke the hearts of spellers and logophiles when the 2020 Scripps National Spelling Bee was canceled due to the pandemic; why the Bee was quickly revived in 2021 and 2022, with changed rules and a partially virtual format; and why the Bee continues to captivate people internationally, motivating countries like Jamaica, China and Ghana to send teams to Washington DC to compete.

The rise of artificial intelligence is causing a lot of unrest these days. The development of machine learning technologies that far surpass human capabilities forces us to think about what ultimately sets us apart from AIs. It also forces us to think about which areas of human life we ​​think need to be automated, and which activities we think need to be defended against AI incursions.

Although the development of ChatGPT and other powerful natural language processing models marks a new, potentially dangerous phase of the digital age, computers have eclipsed humans for decades without destroying the landscape of intellectual sports. The IBM computer Deep Blue defeated international grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, and IBM Watson defeated Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in 2011. Despite these victories for AI over raw human intellect, people still follow competitive chess and watch quiz shows. Likewise, the National Spelling Bee makes waves every year, even though we’ve been in the age of spell check software for decades now. Spelling bees, chess matches and quiz shows are celebrations of human skill, training, performance and grace under pressure. Whether machines can duplicate or surpass the performance of flesh-and-blood competitors is irrelevant. And since computers cannot experience nerves and jitters, it is impossible to recreate the lived experience of a human competitor using a machine substitute.

There is a remarkable thrill in watching spellers – who are typically between nine and 14 years old – figure out a word on stage in real time, under high pressure. Spellers have only 75 seconds to ask questions and a total of 90 seconds to spell. The ballroom where the spelling takes place is a high-pressure environment. The tension is incredibly sharp – even while watching TV you can feel the focus of the spellers and the strength of their concentration. Spellers perform a mental tightrope walk: one misstep, one missed letter, and a journey that spans years and thousands of hours of focused practice and language study is all over. It’s all or nothing: absolute, brutal and exciting to watch.

Competitive spellers are “word detectives.” They receive training in applied linguistics, often practicing with parents, teachers and coaches like me. Spellers collect a huge repertoire of Latin and Greek stems – there are at least 800 of them my textbook Words of Wisdom – which they can then use to analyze virtually any Latin or Greek derived word. They master the phonetic rules that structure the orthographic systems of French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Greek and German. They train their unconscious minds to detect patterns, and they cultivate a sense of when a word is likely to be an exception to the phonetic rules. They acquire the ability to develop and refine a hypothesis about the spelling of a word in real time Bayesian inference – iteratively updating their initial hypothesis before they start spelling, based on the answers they receive to their questions.

Spelling isn’t just about dotting the dots and crossing the T’s. Like good writing, spelling is largely about the art of paying close and undivided attention. Attention is indeed the most important element of being a champion player. Spellers must pay close attention to a word’s etymology, the nuances of which may indicate a need to break a language’s usual spelling rules. They need to consider the parts of speech carefully – in French words, for example, the plural endings -S And -X are generally quiet. They should observe and sift the definition, looking for keywords: If a word is Latin or Greek, the definition will generally contain one to three words that are clues to its roots. And they have to think about all the pronunciations: if a word has multiple pronunciations, their spelling must match all the pronunciations, otherwise the spelling is likely to be wrong.

Nowadays it requires constant attention of vital importance and increasingly difficult, a product of Phones, the internet and ‘brain fog’. In a world where our consciousness is pulled in a million different directions, the National Spelling Bee is a celebration of knowledge, discipline and focus. Every year the competition shows what undivided attention can achieve. Spellers’ achievements in orthographic prowess, performed only under high pressure through intense effort, are an inspiration for us to strengthen our powers of concentration, an invitation for us to pay attention to the wonderful world around us , even in the face of ubiquitous distractions .