The problem is that for every Lincoln you have hundreds of thousands of people who will never put together a sentence of that caliber, myself included.
I don't worry about great writers using this app and becoming more machine like. But everyday I come across documentation or emails that would benefit from this app.
I suppose I haven't given up on the idea that all of us can aim at being more fully human. You might be able to put together a sentence of that caliber! Particularly if you read a large corpus of great writing.
The worry is that young writers will become more machine-like in their thoughts, as part of a broader project to make people more machine like. For example, Google Docs complained to me that the sentence, "We will analyze the ballistics of the South Dakota, focusing on parameterizing the equations of motion" was incorrect because you don't put "the" in front of the name of a state. But I was talking about BB-57, the USS South Dakota, a battleship. Google Docs, naturally, doesn't have a sense of historical context.
I'm no great writer, to be sure, but the computer just doesn't understand what I mean, so it flags my thoughts as being wrong in some way. That smoothing out our thoughts is a long-term problem if our goal is to lead human lives, particularly as it makes it into education.
The difficulty, of course, is that clarity is primarily a function of ideas and meaning, and ideas and meaning are totally opaque to tools like this. For example, no complaints about this sentence:
> The poets breach the digestives by moatbutt every Thur.
And if I change the sentence to:
> The poets breach the digestives by moatbutt every Thurs.
it tells me my reading level has changed from 7th to 8th grade despite Thurs being a much more common shortening of "Thursday" than "Thur", which is nonsense. God forbid such tools ever be used with young students.
I don't worry about great writers using this app and becoming more machine like. But everyday I come across documentation or emails that would benefit from this app.