Being imperfectly perfect; how having flaws actually makes you more human

In the age of AI, accepting typos and grammatical flaws makes writing feel human. Imperfections aren't failures, they are a sign of real life.

So I’m going to just bash this out in Word (as there is a difference between a human writing and a human that doesn’t even bother using a spell checker), however the whole point of this post is about doing it this way (and should be the way) to produce content.

Not long ago I wrote that blog post about coding not really being about the code, I wrote it in a bit of a rush (and probably a bit annoyed about AI), however I put it up there. I happened to be chatting to someone about AI in the workplace and shared a link to it. After a while he replied saying there was a lot he agreed with me from that post, however there were a few typos and grammatical errors that should be looked at. As it was quite long, I had scanned over it a few times, but it felt about right.

Now this would indicate that you should put your copy through a human copywriter to make it sound more professional (even though it was a thought piece), however it made me check out a theory. I did three things:

• Scored the piece I wrote for signs of AI
• Asked the AI to read the piece and point out any typos and grammar errors
• Asked the AI to take the piece and rewrite it to ensure there are no typos and grammar errors

For the first item the words scored (99% Human, 1% Mixed). I mean I’m 100% human but whatever. The second approach scored, after I manually updated the typos and grammatical errors (95% human, 5% mixed). The third approach scored (0% human, 82% AI, 18% mixed).

This, though not totally unexpected, was more brutal than I’d thought it might be. The third approach had taken a 2500-ish word piece I had written that sounded human and made it sound generic, devoid of personality and, basically AI slop. All my effort to actually write that piece lost to the AI ripping the humanity out of the words I chose.

The ‘uneducated story teller / author’ approach I might have used when it came to paragraph structure or other stuff I know nothing about as I ‘do computers’ not ‘English lit.’ all lost; It had stopped me sounding human. It was like the piece had lost its ‘Human Meta Data’; the points were the same however that human touch was removed.

Now this isn’t a rant about using AI for coding or tasks where there is more of a Boolean outcome, it works / it is right versus it doesn’t work / it is wrong; however when it comes to writing, the words produced and the way they are ordered show that fleshy fingers pressed buttons to make what you are reading.

It’s the second thing I did that was actually the most interesting, I corrected some typos and grammar issues, and I appear to have become less human? So why might that be?

This got me deep into a rabbit hole and I started to realise something. A random typo here, the odd grammatical error there. Maybe mixing up how there, their and they’re are used; even adding the same same word in a sentence as you were typing too quickly… Do you know who might make mistakes like that? A human. Do you know what will NEVER make a mistake like that, AI and our robot overlords.

So, weird as it might sound, people are now looking for subtle issues with sentence structure, the odd typo or similar error, as we all get used to reading the generic tone AI-produced content feels like.

Sure you don’t want to produce something that is basically impossible to read or understand as it’s all over the shop (this is equally as unprofessional as using AI), but those little errors, even ones that your mind can jump over when you skim read; it’s those imperfections that makes you sound human. Humans have flaws, and in the age of AI maybe we need to be more proud of that fact.