Should we keep typos in our writing?
I previously used to silently judge websites for typos, but looking back, I definitely was too harsh. Past me would have heavily judged this site for the typos and grammatical errors.
Thing is, I’m choosing to keep them in because I want to reduce friction and make it as easy as possible to write and get my thoughts out there. Past me would have tried to make every post perfect by sending drafts to three friends and my entire family. Sounds good in practice, but it just leads to a pile of unpublished writing. Also, I don’t have three friends.
Anyway, back to the point. AI has made it way too easy to create a website, create a post, and publish it to the internet with one click. As someone who reads a lot on the internet, I can kinda tell when something was written with AI. It’s a little hard to point out exactly what it is, but there are many established AI-writing patterns, like “it’s not X, it’s Y”, or writing long sentences that tell you nothing. The moment I realize this, mind just turns off, and I find it really hard to continue reading.
Occasionally, I see a typo in a blog post or article and realize, “great! I’m not longer in enemy territory”.
In a few years, will it be our flaws that let us prove who we are? Typos are one example, but I do think that maybe the inability to complete a puzzle or Captcha will end up proving our humanity. I guess the flaw with this is that it’s easy to tell your LLM something like “include a typo somewhere”.