CS50

Why You’re Still Better Than AI at Editing Documents - CS50 Tech Talk

A CS50 Tech Talk, with Nick Bernal of SuperDoc Word documents are where work becomes tangible: contracts, research papers, school assignments, government forms. They have to be correct, trusted, and displayed exactly as intended. For a long time, that was a human problem. Today, software and AI are expected to edit these documents too, working alongside humans and at scale. You can open a .docx and change a sentence without anything else falling apart. AI still struggles to do that reliably. The reason is buried inside the document itself: a structure with its own logic, its own rules, its own way of holding meaning together across a page: more like a program than a text file. A human can edit one document at a time. A computer can operate on thousands simultaneously, but only if every change can be trusted. That requires treating documents not as files, but as software.