Recently I came across an email about a job posting that caught my attention. It was not the job in particular, but a specific sentence in the description.
It read “Required Skills & Qualifications: 210 years of experience in …” While it sounded funny at first glance, it felt odd too, for the reason that it’s been some time since I have come across an error like this in an email.
Email and text generation has been widely dominated by AI lately, in fact that’s something generative AI does best. While we see a lot of errors with workflows in emails - like seeing the raw AI prompt in the email body instead of the actual text, as the system was not integrated well, a grammatical or semantic error in a sentence is uncommon these days.
In a world where text content is dominated by AI-generated material, a small human error feels like a breath of fresh air. My point is not that we should embrace all the errors out there, that would be catastrophic. A small error by a surgeon could cost the life of a person. My point is this - in this era, the small errors and imperfections in our creative and communicative work will define the humaneness of it. Because that is the main differentiator, apart from your voice and style.
In a world where text content is dominated by AI-generated material, a small human error feels like a breath of fresh air.
It’s also likely that as AI content gets more mainstream and a norm, we might fully adapt to this change over the years. Right now, most of us get a gut feeling when some content feels too perfect and AI generated and we don’t give it as much credibility as we would have if it was fully human-written. That could change in the coming years, but I feel we will always value the human element.
There’s no going back to the time when we wrote every text ourselves and software corrected grammar and spelling. We are past that now. However, we will still continue to value and praise human written content.
It’s becoming hard to differentiate what’s AI-generated and what’s human-written. We have to wait and see how this would unfold.
Would you rather read something written by a person or an AI that learned the person’s style and wrote it better? And what if you are never told which one is which?
