With the advent of AI, polished, formal and grammatically sound language is being viewed by the world over with increased suspicion as it can often be perceived as being inauthentic and having been created by a machine. AI-use can also be frowned upon in professional settings, as seemingly AI-generated text in e-mail may have many mistaking it for spam and not giving them a second glance.
Venture capitalist Ben Horowitz has introduced the browser plugin 'Sinceerly', a sort of "evil twin" of Grammarly that deliberately introduces human-like errors in text to make the writing look less artificial.
Horowitz himself called this plugin the "anti-Grammarly" and said that he used it to "cold-email" five Fortune-500 Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), with four responding back. He noted the e-mails he was sent were short and contained typos which he used to illustrate his point about the imperfection of human communication.
Sinceerly introduces small errors into the user's text such as typos, omission of capitalisation and making sentence structure more lax.
The AI tool creates the illusion of a human having put thought and effort into manually typing out a message, something that mirrored Horowitz's personal experience with typing and spelling when he was starting out in his career. He views the plugin as a potential solution to AI's "overcorrection" of writing.
The plugin also has a 'CEO mode' to mimic a hasty e-mail sent out by an executive, with the hallmark typos. It also includes the option to add e-mail signatures such as 'Sent From My iPhone' to make the mail look more plausible.
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Users on the internet responded to the hype by trying out the plugin but were quick to report bugs. They stated that it was unreliable and deemed it to be more "experimental" than refined.
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