Why the typo changed from a public embarrassment to an endearing sign of being human

A personal story from PW co-creator, Shamalee

The other week, when we were wrapping up an intense period leading up to travel overseas, I couldn't proofread a story that my partner published for our studio newsletter, and it went out with a grammatical error. Now, this was not the first time our studio has made a little mistake, but seeing it on my screen still brought up a bad taste at the back of my throat. Unlike all the previous times, when I would torture myself and question my credibility as a writer, the bad taste subsided almost immediately, because the calm voice in my head said, “Well, it leaves no doubt that this newsletter is written by humans and not AI.”

This got me thinking about how creators will most likely start seeing errors or other slips in perfection more as a hallmark of the humanness in their work, and less as embarrassing things to camouflage. It’s not just when it comes to mistakes; it’s interesting to consider how AI—or the perception of it—will influence creativity around the idea of ‘perfection.’

Just a few weeks ago, I read how the em dash—probably my favourite punctuation mark, because I like to introduce offshoots of ideas into sentences—is starting to get the reputation as a sign of AI writing. And it’s not entirely unfounded; ChatGPT seems to have a habitual devotion to the em dash, giving unnecessary significance to pauses and breaks in common sentences. Because of this, I found myself consciously holding back on the em dash, forcing myself not to bring my layered thoughts into sentences. Soon enough, I realized that I was compromising my mind’s mechanism just to distance my work from what’s perceived as a sign of AI-generated creativity. As much as we are used to prototyping and shaping AI, it will also undoubtedly shape us—the way we create, and our distinction of what makes our creativity ‘human.’

I recently visited my old university at the invitation to critique an undergraduate project on designing stories for Sri Lankan cities in predominantly visual aspects, with some written language components. Here, I became highly aware of how I judge the value of creative work against what I consider to be genuine human creative output versus AI-generated. In 70% of the work presented, the written components of the story, such as slogans and promotional texts, reeked of ChatGPT. And I’m not talking about sentence structure or an overuse of the em dash. Although I couldn’t put a finger on what was so distinctly ChatGPT about those works at the time, now I can. It’s best explained as “saying a lot without saying anything”: words that are strung together to create a sense of (subjective) beauty, but utterly hollow of lived experience and a viewpoint. They are not directional. Words that have logical and even aesthetic coherence, but don’t communicate a point of view in an idea; that have the micro-connections, and the many emotional and sensory associations that we humans make with things in our mind and things we perceive in the outer world. They lacked the many dimensions that seep into the writing of a human who has genuinely experienced the subject. For those students, I didn’t think mediocre writing posed a great threat, particularly because their course was more focused on the visual elements of storytelling. However, I was concerned that they were missing out on the accidental wonder of creativity by using ChatGPT for creative writing.

An idea is not limited to one form of expression; the same idea has many forms, such as visual, linguistic, sonic, etc. When you approach an idea from many directions, your view of it becomes richer and more distinct. As a design student many years ago, I discovered the joy of writing simply through attempts to describe ideas as best as possible. Although my projects were not being marked for writing per se, my attempt to use language to articulate an idea gave me a different hold on it—something more concrete and definitive that visuals didn’t deliver. Ultimately, it led me to a career focusing more on writing designed for commercial outcomes. But I wondered if the students who used ChatGPT for their project writing were missing out on the chance to get a different grip on their idea—or even a breakthrough into an entirely different career path in creativity. I don’t know; too soon to tell. Who am I to judge? Each to their own life and times, isn’t it?

I’m not against AI; in fact, I think it has the potential to rid us of meaningless or tedious tasks. I use a trained version of ChatGPT to draft emails, formal letters to the city council, project proposals, notes to the lawyer, follow-ups, lists… things that I don’t care to excel at. But when it comes to creative writing, AI is more of a technical assistant than a substitute: to cross-check whether a new story contradicts an old one in a series; to proofread and grammar-check drafts. I look forward to the day when AI can do everything I don’t want to do: filing taxes, laundry, groceries, bookkeeping, managing employees—even if it’s at the cost of another machine having an enormous influence on my life. Anything to escape doing chores so I can read and write more, really.

Until then, I just have to watch how the world evolves, understand our parts in shaping it, and hold on to what I like about being human a little closer.