To make a typo is mortifying enough; to make a typo during sexting—as I did, only two weeks ago—means it is time to destroy all your belongings, change your identity and quietly move to Antarctica. As far as typos go, it wasn’t even particularly embarrassing: thinking about you f**king meet, I wrote, instead of me. But for days afterwards, I suffered from sporadic cringe attacks, wincing at how my lustful brain, in its bumbling over-enthusiasm, was entirely useless. Fortunately, there are also merits to making typos while sexting: in the throes of passion, no one is concerned about spelling errors and everyone involved moves on swiftly. If the same mistake is made on a group chat, however, it can haunt you until the end of your life. In seventh grade, my classmate Sakina, arguing with someone calling her by a teasing nickname on the school group chat, confidently declared, “I am Dakina.” (Yes, the D key is right next to the S key). For the next four years until we graduated, Dakina she remained.
Look up ‘embarrassing typos’ on the internet and a zillion listicles appear, an exercise in gratefulness because thank God you’re not one of these poor souls. There is the person who applied for a ‘pubic’ relations position, the man who invited 40 professors and their students to an online ‘boob’ club and ‘Penis’ (instead of ‘peanut’) butter Snickers, possibly someone’s favourite snack..? Then there is the 1631 edition of the Bible, which accidentally omitted a single word from the Ten Commandments and consequently came to be known as the Wicked or Sinners’ Bible. The word left out was ‘not’; the resulting sentence: “Thou shalt commit adultery.” Another misprint in the same book changed the word ‘greatness’ to ‘greate-asse’, leading to a sentence reading: “Behold, the Lord our God hath shewed us his glory and his great-asse.” One begins to suspect they were messing around on purpose.
But there is also something to be said for the fact that so many typos are born in moments of passion. Far too often, I’ve eagerly typed out an email to an editor, fingers flying around the keyboard until I press send—only to realise, a minute later, that I’ve made some embarrassing grammatical error or spelling mistake: not exactly a testimony to my skills as a writer. Some months ago, after getting into an infuriating political argument with a classmate over text, my friend Shivani lamented on our group chat: hateee myself for all the typos. But as more and more people maddeningly turn to artificial intelligence to assist them with even the most basic conversations, this passion is fast vanishing from our exchanges with each other.
On her podcast Miss Me?, singer Lily Allen revealed she uses ChatGPT to formulate arguments with her then-husband David Harbour. 22-year-old fashion student Anushka recalls a man who tried to convince her not to break up with him–in a text that started with: Hello, hope you’re well. I will be taking 15 minutes of your time. “I felt as if he was writing a job application. It didn’t feel romantic or intimate in any way,” she confesses. “It wasn’t coming out of love. It was coming from a machine.” Additionally, AI has turned dating apps even more dystopian: catfishing is no longer the only concern; there is also chatfishing. “The dating pool at my age in Chennai is tiny. I met this interesting guy on Bumble and grew to really like him. From his texts, he seemed well-rounded and articulate. Whenever I was having a bad day, he’d share comforting, beautifully-worded messages,” says 42-year-old Pavitra. In the middle of these poetic ramblings, there would sometimes be a random message riddled with errors, but she wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. Until one day, in the middle of a serious conversation, he ended up posting his ChatGPT prompt into the Bumble chat. “When I confronted him, he tried to dismiss it by saying he was driving. The excuse didn’t make sense and I cancelled our approaching first date.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: vogue.in
