Have We Reached ‘Post Proofreading’ Thanks to AI?
This X post (tweet) I saw recently on X (Twitter) stood out to me:
Social Media Manager oversees marketing campaign Brand Leadership: (silent)
— Jon-Stephen Stansel (@jsstansel) July 29, 2023
Social Media Manager increases website traffic Brand Leadership: (silent)
Social Media Manager works 24/7 on crisis comms Brand Leadership: (silent)
Social Media Manager makes a typo
Brand Leadership: pic.twitter.com/KyKOiLJzy0
In my world, a typo is akin to a four-alarm fire, so I immediately sided with the hypothetical “Brand Leadership” in Jon-Stephen’s post.
However, others agreed with his take that there’s nothing to see here, folks, if a typo shows its ugly self:
Typos bring the best engagement though 😂
— Ayyaz (@_working_draft) July 29, 2023
Typos humanize the brand. The only time I really stressed was working on the agency comms, which were samples of our work. Glad to be on the brand side now.
— Jean Burke-Spraker (@jburkespraker) July 29, 2023
Do typos “humanize the brand”?
That last post I highlighted above makes this claim, in response to Jon-Stephen Stansel’s original post.
I got more evidence of this when I interacted this past week with a SaaS company co-founder and coaching service VP of Sales who has 90k+ followers on LinkedIn. I saw that he had a few typos in one of his LinkedIn posts and DM’d him with a screenshot showing him so that he could edit his post if he wanted.
He quickly replied thanking me, and added:
It’s so odd though, the posts that have errors get the most traction because people know they are real and not AI generated, however I try to not make them haha.
Typos as proof of human authority because an AI would never let any slip through — that gave me food for thought.
In the camp of “perfection to signal the highest value”….
Then I saw this LinkedIn post from entrepreneur influencer Alex Hormozi:
Note that he included “[that] no one does” when advocating that companies do at least “basic proofreading.” His premise is that proofreading should be part of the recipe for product or service development because few competitors do it. And because many don’t, your product/service will be viewed as higher quality, helping to improve “know, like, and trust” and, ultimately, sales conversions.
So, has AI brought us to the age of “post proofreading”?
After doing this temperature check of the marketplace, I’d answer: it depends.
If you’re a solopreneur, or your business is all about a personal brand, then two concurrent trends…
Social media users being increasingly trained to equate typos with human — and not AI — content generation, and
Google recently saying that "AI content has no magic ranking powers"
…could lead you to spend few if any resources on proofreading.
I argue that in almost all other business contexts, having at least one human check your copy before it’s sent to your audience is a good thing — even if it’s only a check of flags cited by technology, such as Grammarly, Google Docs, or your website or email publishing platform. After all, a cursory Google search on the relationship between typos and sales conversions shows a lot of data, just since 2011, supporting that more of the former leads to fewer of the latter.
