Dumbing Down Your Writing Isn't Anti-AI — It's Just Dumb
The answer to AI is not typos
We’ve finally found our answer to the continued rise of AI sludge and the ever-shrinking gap between the output of the computer and that of the human.
Make ourselves look less competent to prove we’re human!
To show our writing isn’t AI-generated, we should now add some editorial flourish, not in the form of creative sentence structure or word choice, but in the form of random typos or completely nonsensical words and sentences, cutting punctuation even when it makes sense, adding in unnecessary punctuation when it doesn’t!!, and continuing to take such a hard stance on the em dash you’d think it was a swastika. This person used an em dash! Call the AI-police and have their damn keyboard incinerated before it can do any more damage to society.
We’ve got ourselves so worked up playing “is it AI” bingo, we’re clearly lost our minds. People are spending less time doing the writing and more time thinking “how do I make sure nobody thinks this is AI-generated?”, even if, in that process, they lower the quality of their work, or make it harder to read, or just make themselves look careless.
We’ve sure found ourselves in an interesting place.
And it’s the wrong place. Who cares if someone thinks your work is AI-generated? Honestly, in most cases it’s just a light form of trolling, or more likely, an AI bot doing some engagement farming. The truth is with the quality of AI-writing pretty high now (especially when the person producing it knows how to use it properly), almost no one can really tell the difference anymore and most of the “checkers” are absolute bullshit. Yes, there are tells, but here’s the thing. The models were trained on human writing, and so, those tells are, or were, distinctly human.
Most of us who write online were here before generative AI. So why are we ceding our agency to it? Why are we letting it decide what we can or can’t use? If anything, we should be doubling down!
The em dash is mine — and you won’t take it away from me.
What I’m trying to say is that none of this is important, and we’re losing sight of what really matters in the AI versus human debate. The AI will keep training on our work. It will keep getting better and better. Heck, if enough of us start producing D-grade work in protest, the AI will probably copy that too. And then what? We switch back to writing like we are some kind of wordsmiths? It’s all wasted energy.
What you can, and should be doing, can be boiled down to two things: your uniquely human experiences, and the voice you share them in.
That’s it. In an AI slop world, it’s the only thing that separates you from the machine. The machine can’t live.
The lesson here is simple. Lean into your quirks, your edginess, your snarkiness, whatever it is, don’t shy away from it. Be you!
AI has made me more appreciative of my dyslexia. The mistakes I fail to see and I appreciate seeing human mistakes in my students writing too. These aren’t from dumbing things down though, just being a human.