Some writers now add typos to indicate they didn’t use AI. There is a better way.
I keep promising myself not to write about AI and yet, to badly paraphrase Pacino from The Godfather Part III, the topic keeps pulling me back in.
Then again, paraphrasing badly is the type of technique writers are increasingly using to avoid looking like they wrote with AI. (In my defence, I always paraphrased badly.)
A recent Wired article talked about how professional writers are now changing their writing styles to make it clear that a human and not a machine did the work, such as by using first-person anecdotes and writing more conversationally.
As anyone who’s ever been to one of my workshops over the past 15 years can attest, one of my golden rules is that writing always needs to sound natural if read out loud. If you’d feel silly, awkward or weird saying it to the reader’s face, you shouldn’t be writing it.
So part of me is happy with this new advice – and part of me is annoyed, because it’s not new at all.
The upside is that because formal, cold and slick writing is now often connected with AI, writers are being forced to write better by being more human: even if that involves introducing a little messiness.
Some people, however, go too far by deliberately introducing typos and starting sentences with lowercase letters to prove they didn’t use AI (I’m especially seeing this on LinkedIn).
Adding typos to your writing makes me cringe: it’s like a restaurant deliberately smearing their front windows with fingerprints and grease just to make it look more authentic.
But I do agree writing needs to be human, which in turn means it shouldn’t be perfect. Don’t get me wrong: it should read well. It should flow. Which alone is why I hate the trend of deliberately adding mistakes, as they interrupt the flow.
People shouldn’t be noticing typos. They shouldn’t be noticing the mechanics of your writing at all. Instead, your writing should be so easy to read they just get the key information they need from it.
If it does this, you can get away with using dashes – and maybe even the occasional (and appropriate) “it’s not x, it’s y” construction – without people assuming you used AI. After all, AI learned those techniques from good writing, so just throwing them away is only going to diminish writing in general.
The art (though I should really call it a craft) of good writing is to make it engaging, informative, easy to read and human. This was always the case but, now that we’re all bombarded with slick and cold AI writing, that human touch has become crucial.
