I’ll admit it: I’m a terrible speller.
I blame growing up with word processors. My formative years of writing were spent staring at a blinking cursor, knowing a little red underline would quietly catch my mistakes. Did it stunt my spelling growth? Probably.
But here’s the thing—it never stopped me from going to a top university, building multiple businesses, or even writing professionally. And thanks to spellcheck, none of those spelling errors ever made it into my final work.
This isn’t new. Technology has been making once-essential skills optional for centuries. Farriers, once critical to everyday transportation, were replaced by auto mechanics. We still have farriers, but they’re not on every street corner.
In our constant pursuit of speed, efficiency, and output, tools replace tasks. Spellcheck replaced the need to memorize every word in the dictionary. Now, generative AI is doing the same for writing, coding, and even design.
The question isn’t whether these tools are “good” or “bad.” The question is whether we adapt to the new way of thinking they require.
I get the argument that spelling and grammar sharpen your thinking. But maybe the thinking we’re sharpening now is different. Instead of focusing on the mechanics of writing, we can focus on ideas, structure, and strategy, letting AI handle the execution.
Just as spellcheck freed writers to focus on content, AI can free us to focus on conceptual thinking. The article, the code, and the blueprint can all start with our vision and be finished by AI. In this model, we’re the managers of the work, not the typists.
So, is the ability to spell and write without assistance our last grip on “being human”? Unlikely.
The irony is, in a world rushing toward AI-powered perfection, a stray typo or awkward grammar might become the only clue that something was created by a human.
If that’s true, then maybe my spelling flaws aren’t a weakness at all. Maybe they’re my last, unmistakable calling card that says: This was made by a humann.