Typo tyranny

Back at the start of the year, there was a glut of terrible thinkpieces, beige LinkedIn posts, and general worthless slop about the value of typos. 

The argument, such as it was, went that in a world of AI perfection, typos helped verify there was a human behind the content. 

At the time, The Cave largely ignored it because even for LinkedIn, it was a whole new level of stupid. But now it’s back. The Atlantic (The. Atlantic.) has written about it. So here goes.

Strategically placing typos in a piece of writing is not a clever hack. It does not prove you are human. It serves only as a sad admission of creative negligence.

It is, of course, easy to sit and snipe. It’s essentially the raison d’être of this newsletter. But let’s, for a moment, try and find a solution.

Because the whole typo shambles is addressing a legitimate concern. How to differentiate from AI when AI is everywhere?

The answer, especially for comms professionals, is uncomfortable. We have to tear down, tear up, tear away from years and years of training. AI has already come for the crutches we’ve long leaned upon. That means ‘not this, but this’, and groups of three (of which there are plenty in this section alone), and corporate waffle, and other reliable means of just getting a piece of writing down on paper and out the door.

When you’ve done that, you’ll end up standing, intellectually naked, with the headlights of a deadline upon you. Embrace the vulnerability. Don’t try to be human, try to be you. Be weird. 

Write long sentences where punctuation is an optional extra you can’t afford but that convey a sense of consciousness and breathless momentum that even the smartest AI cannot comprehend let alone achieve. Swear. Risk offending someone. Make a reference only one person would understand.

But don’t do typos. Typos suck.

P.S. This, from Sam Kriss, is a great example of all of these things, and makes the argument about AI writing far better than we just did.