It seems like some people are taking the phrase–"To err is human" too literally.

In The Typo Vibe Shift, Michael Waters wrote about how people are deliberately adding typos to their writing so people do not think their work is AI generated.

Some job applicants are intentionally adding typos to their cover letters to prove that they, and not an AI program, wrote them. Celebrities and CEOs are sending out error-ridden emails and Instagram Stories, and instead of getting a scolding, they are praised for sounding authentic. On some dating apps, where people are, somewhat absurdly, prompted to compose their profiles with AI, typos are apparently no longer an automatic repellent.

I did this too¹. In the early days, when people began claiming that anything with an em dash in it was AI generated, I began using a hyphen instead.

This morning I was reading, Jo Livingstone’s How literature became Word Perfect in which she writes about the effects that early Word Processors had on the writers of the time. This bit jumped out at me.

Indeed, some writers would conceal the fact that they used a word processor for fear of being tarnished by an association with automation or inauthenticity. In a 2011 New York Times article, Gish Jen recalled colleagues at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1980s doctoring their printouts, adding unnecessary pencil annotations in order to make their manuscripts seem more “real,” less perfect. Perfect copy, after all, was for the typist, not the genius.

Isn’t that interesting? We tear ragged little holes in our veil of words, just so people can peer in and know we exist.

Notes