46 Times People Made Horrible Typos, And It Made The Internet Cringe

Relying on tech too much can come at the cost of your critical thinking abilities.

Spell-check and autocorrect tools are practically unavoidable if you spend time on your computer or phone. They have been around for a long while, and there have been endless debates about whether the tech is making everyone dumber and worse typists.

But recently, a new breed of tools, powered by artificial intelligence, has been spreading far and wide, and that has renewed the debate about the overreliance on tech and how it affects people’s skills.

Covering a recent study by Microsoft, Forbes points out that the “dispute over whether technology is making us dumber is nothing new — it only makes sense researchers are asking the same questions about AI.”

Forbes warns that everyone should be wary of the potential downsides of relying on AI too much. Not to mention the negative impact it could leave on your critical thinking abilities.

“For years, there has been a debate whether spell-checking tools like Grammarly and autocorrect have made us worse spellers. While there’s no academic consensus, such tools have certainly made us lazier spellers. It seems AI is similarly making us lazier thinkers, which — as Microsoft’s study points out — is also making us think we’re also getting dumber.”

According to the recent report by Microsoft, the more that employees relied on artificial intelligence for help, the less actual critical thinking they did. The researchers note that these “tools appear to reduce the perceived effort required for critical thinking tasks among knowledge workers, especially when they have higher confidence in AI capabilities.”

They add: “However, workers who are confident in their own skills tend to perceive greater effort in these tasks, particularly when evaluating and applying AI responses.”

In a nutshell, when you automate routine tasks, you deprive workers of the opportunities to “practice their judgment and strengthen their cognitive musculature, leaving them atrophied and unprepared when the exceptions do arise.”

That’s not to say that all tech is ‘bad’ or that AI ‘is the devil,’ but this underscores the importance of investing in your own skills, too. And that means doing things the hard, boring way, to grow and improve.

The Microsoft study warns that while AI helps with worker efficiency, this comes at the cost of critical engagement with work. In the long-run, this overreliance on AI can lead to “diminished skill for independent problem-solving.”

In the meantime, AI is changing how spell-check and autocorrect work, too. Purely anecdotally, some of us have noticed a massive drop in the quality of spell-check tools ever since LLMs started going public a few years ago. But that’s subjective.

Though, to be fair, the public has noticed something similar, too. The Guardian reports that last autumn, after the release of Apple’s iOS 26 operating system, users noticed the autocorrect on their iPhones going haywire.

However, why the autocorrect on iPhones temporarily went cuckoo is unclear. And it is unlikely that we’ll ever find out.

“There’s a lot of different forms of autocorrect. It’s a little hard to know what technology people are actually employing to do their prediction, because it’s all underneath the surface,” statistician Jan Pedeson, who worked on autocorrect for Microsoft, told The Guardian.

Meanwhile, computational linguist Kenneth Church, one of the godfathers of autocorrect back in the 1990s, noted: “What Apple does is always a deep, dark secret. And Apple is better at keeping secrets than most companies.”

Good spelling is paramount for clarity and building trust with your audience. It is how you build a reputation for reliability and quality. However, it is not apocalyptic if you make a mistake. We all make them. The sign of a truly quality source is acknowledging that a mistake has been made, and then editing it.

However, as author and Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway notes in a piece on the BBC, people should not obsess over making spelling mistakes or typos because they aren’t what makes their writing good or bad.

“Writing is a sophisticated job and our brains focus on the structure, the sentences and the phrases, leaving the close-up work to be done on autopilot. Afterwards we are programmed to read only what we think we have written, not what we actually have. If that is the case, it is odd that we make such a phenomenal fuss about them.”

Kellaway adds that if you are hiring someone, you should not disqualify them for having a typo in their CV, unless you are, say, looking for a proofreader.

“If human beings have any remaining competitive advantage over the machines, it is not our skill at crossing i's and dotting t's. It is our ability to write something that provokes a response - and not just because it contains a howler or a spelling mistake,” she states.

The ‘I Had a Stroke’ online group has been around since 2018, and just recently celebrated its 8th birthday. The idea behind the community is very straightforward. Everyone is encouraged to share photos and screenshots of typos that are so bad that “you would think you’re having a stroke” (or “you would thnk ye havin an stroke” as the moderators originally wrote it).

The mods point out that their online group is in no way related to actual strokes. “Real strokes are not allowed. Images of a person having a stroke, known to have had a stroke, or appears to be imitating having a stroke are not allowed.”

This sounds obvious and like common sense. But you have to wonder what happened to make the mods spell things out like this to everyone?

Meanwhile, the ‘I Had a Stroke’ group stresses that it values originality and authenticity. So, fake or staged situations and intentional typos are not allowed. Furthermore, if you plan on posting in the group, you have to ensure that the content is family-friendly and that you avoid anything related to politics or current events.

And to make sure that everyone’s poking fun at the typos and not the people making them, you’re not allowed to share any personal information. Make sure that you censor it! Again, the point is to laugh at the typos, not the people misstyping things.

Once you’ve upvoted the images that made you laugh the most, why not join the discussion in the comments? Tell us which of these typos made you laugh the hardest.

Meanwhile, what are the biggest, most hilarious, and bizarre typos that you’ve ever made? Have you found that relying on spellchecking tools has made your typing more sloppy or the opposite? Let us know!

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