I thought this was going to be a short rant about typos.
It started — as it often does — with laundry. I had a video playing in the background while folding clothes, half-listening as a creator broke down some update from a game I follow a little too closely. Nothing serious. Just catching up.
But then a word caught my ear — one that didn’t sound quite right. It didn’t fit the sentence or the context. I couldn’t even tell if it was a mispronunciation or a misunderstanding, just that something about it knocked the whole point sideways.
So I paused. Rewound. Still didn’t make sense. Eventually I tracked down a screenshot of the original statement they were reading from — and there it was. A single word, spoken wrong, had shifted the meaning just enough to make everything feel off. I had to stop folding, stop listening, and go into detective mode just to understand what was actually being said.
“I wasn’t trying to be picky. I was just trying to follow along. And it turns out that’s harder than it should be.”
It wasn’t malicious. It wasn’t even careless, exactly. But it wasn’t right. And what unsettled me more than the slip was just how normal it felt — like this sort of thing happens all the time now. Like we’ve quietly made peace with it.
It crept in slowly — so slowly we didn’t notice. No alarms. No flash-points. Just a steady simmer of almosts and good-enoughs until one day, clarity was gone and confusion felt normal.
I wasn’t trying to be picky. I was just trying to follow along. And I couldn’t.
Miscommunication as a Barrier, Not a Quirk
I wish I could say this was an isolated case — a one-off slip while someone was talking too fast or paraphrasing too casually. But it’s not.
It happens constantly, especially when creators are trying to move quickly. They paraphrase without saying so. They squint at statements and translate them mid-sentence. They half-quote, re-frame, and improvise — and it all sounds close enough until you try to actually follow along. Until you need the exact word to understand what’s being said.
And here’s where this stops being just a personal irritation and starts to feel like a systemic problem: not everyone has the luxury of watching every second of a video. Some people listen while multitasking. Some rely on captions. Some need the audio version to be accurate because that is their version. And when the words don’t match — when a creator skims, fumbles, or rewrites without care — it turns comprehension into a guessing game.
It’s not about pedantry. It’s about accessibility.
We talk a lot about inclusivity in content — but somehow, the basics of clarity have fallen out of fashion. We’ve replaced accuracy with vibes. And we’ve decided that if the energy is right, the details can be fuzzy.
But the thing is, when the details get fuzzy, the meaning gets lost. And when the meaning gets lost, so do people.
Enter the Machines — The Convenient Scapegoat
Of course, the moment you bring up accuracy, someone inevitably blames the machines.
The AI wrote that. The captions were auto-generated. The summary came from an algorithm. The app was “doing its best.” And look — sometimes, that’s true. We’ve all seen those butchered YouTube captions that turn “systems update” into “sisters up late.” It happens.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: the AI didn’t decide to be lazy. We did.
We chose to publish without review. We chose to skim instead of read. We chose to treat “draft” as “done” because the machine got us 80% of the way there and we were already behind schedule. The tech didn’t lower the bar — we just got used to ducking under it.
And now, instead of fixing the problem, we’ve turned on the tool.
That’s what makes this moment so strange: we’re in a place where AI could help us clean up these issues — flag unclear references, auto-correct clumsy paraphrasing, even sync captions to source text — but we’ve made it taboo. We act like using AI for polish is dishonest, even while we publish messy content and shrug it off.
At what point did we decide that “close enough” from a human is charming, but “exact” from a machine is cheating?
That’s a thread worth pulling. We’ve already explored this dynamic in another piece — “AI Cheating Isn’t the Problem. The U.S. Education System Is.” — and this feels like its quieter cousin. It’s not about education this time, but comprehension. The same rot, just in a different drawer.
And for folks who need precision — deaf and hard of hearing communities, neurodivergent viewers, multilingual audiences — this isn’t a cute philosophical debate. This is a daily grind of working around everyone else’s carelessness. I’d love to bring in a friend’s perspective here — someone with lived experience who can speak to what it feels like when a simple misquote becomes a barrier, not a blip.
Because when you get right down to it, clarity isn’t just a style choice. It’s an act of inclusion.
The 51% Mindset — And What We Lose Quietly
Somewhere along the way, 51% became the goal.
Not the baseline. Not the floor. The target.
Good enough to pass. Good enough to post. Good enough to sleep at night, as long as no one points out the missing pieces — or worse, needs them.
And maybe that’s what’s really been bothering me. Not the typos. Not the slips or stumbles or wrong words in the wrong order.
It’s the way we’ve started treating clarity like an optional upgrade. A stretch goal. A courtesy you add if you have time — but never the thing that makes or breaks the message.
But it does break the message. Quietly. Cumulatively. Every time a caption skips the key phrase. Every time a paraphrase becomes the new version. Every time the person on the other side of the screen can’t follow along and doesn’t get to ask why.
This isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being present. It’s about recognizing when the bar has dropped so low we’ve started tripping over it — and calling that momentum.
Because if we don’t even notice when 49% of the meaning gets lost…
Then what are we really communicating?
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