Long Live the Typo: How to Navigate AI Fatige in Modern Marketing
Yes, the typo is intentional.
The email subject line had a typo. Not a glaring one. Just a missing letter, the kind most readers would subconsciously autocorrect before fully registering it. Still, it was enough to slow the scroll and signal that a real person had written the message. In a digital landscape increasingly filled with perfectly polished, AI-generated content, that small imperfection felt unexpectedly refreshing.
That reaction points to a growing tension in modern marketing. Content is faster to produce and cleaner than it has ever been, yet it is also easier than ever to ignore. As AI-generated material floods inboxes, feeds, and search results, audiences are beginning to tune out not because the content is bad, but because so much of it feels interchangeable. Welcome to the era of AI fatigue.
The Quiet Rise of AI Fatigue
AI fatigue is not about fear of automation or resistance to new tools. Most marketing teams now use AI daily for brainstorming, outlines, research summaries, and copy refinement. These tools are efficient, accessible, and often genuinely useful. The issue emerges when the same systems are applied in the same ways across the industry. Spend a few minutes scrolling LinkedIn between meetings and the pattern becomes obvious. Posts look thoughtful, read smoothly, and then disappear without leaving much behind. Blog articles are technically solid and emotionally flat. Thought leadership explains concepts clearly while carefully avoiding a point of view.
AI has not made content worse. It has made average content unavoidable. When audiences are flooded with material that is perfectly adequate, adequacy becomes invisible.
When Perfection Starts Working Against You
For years, marketers were trained to eliminate friction. Copy should be polished, edges should be smoothed, and messaging should be optimized for clarity and scale. AI excels at this kind of refinement. It removes typos, balances sentences, and softens language that might sound too sharp or too opinionated. In many cases, that efficiency is genuinely helpful. But it also introduces a subtle risk. When everything is refined to the same neutral standard, content can feel correct without feeling true.
Human communication is rarely that tidy. People double back, overemphasize certain points, rush others, and occasionally say things imperfectly. Those imperfections act as signals. They indicate intention, authorship, and belief. As AI-driven polish becomes more common, perfection itself is beginning to signal automation. Audiences may not consciously articulate that shift, but they sense it, and they respond by disengaging.
What “Long Live the Typo” Really Means
This is not an argument for carelessness or low standards. No brand benefits from sloppy work or avoidable errors. The typo serves as a metaphor for something larger: human signal in an environment that quietly pushes everything toward the same smooth, neutral centre. A typo suggests that a real person made a decision. It implies that a message was sent with intent, not endlessly optimized into blandness. It hints that someone cared more about saying something meaningful than about making it impossible to disagree with.
When anyone can generate content instantly, execution stops being the differentiator. Judgment takes its place.
Why This Matters for Canadian Marketers
The Canadian marketing landscape has long been relationship-driven, with trust, credibility, and reputation carrying significant weight. Those qualities are built slowly and lost quickly. AI fatigue becomes a problem when speed and volume start to override those fundamentals. When everything is optimized, very little feels intentional. When everything is helpful, almost nothing is memorable. And when everything is technically correct, it becomes difficult to understand what a brand actually believes.
The brands that continue to earn attention will not be the ones publishing the most content. They will be the ones whose voice is recognizable before the logo appears.
How to Navigate AI Fatige Without Losing Your Voice
Navigating AI fatigue does not require abandoning AI altogether. The real risk lies in using these tools on autopilot. AI works best as a starting point, not a decision-maker. It can help organize thinking, accelerate drafts, and reduce friction at the beginning of the process, but judgment, framing, and point of view still need to come from humans. Content that does not require judgment rarely earns trust.
Slowing down also matters. Faster output can feel productive, but it is not always strategic. Fewer pieces with stronger ideas tend to outperform constant activity that adds little new value. In this context, friction is not a failure. It is a feature that forces clarity.
Voice plays a critical role here. Instead of asking whether a piece of content will perform, marketers should ask whether it sounds unmistakably like them. Voice is one of the few assets competitors cannot replicate with a prompt. If it is not protected, it gradually disappears. Leaving human signals in the work matters more than ever. Short sentences, slightly unexpected phrasing, a clear stance, and even the occasional imperfection act as cues that there is a person on the other side of the screen.
The Opportunity in an AI-Saturated World
As AI levels the playing field on execution, differentiation moves upstream. Trust becomes harder to earn and more valuable once established. Taste begins to matter again. Judgment becomes the thing audiences pay attention to, even if they cannot quite name it.
The brands that cut through AI fatigue will not be the loudest or the most prolific. They will be the ones that feel unmistakably human, clear about what they believe, intentional about what they publish, and confident enough to leave a little edge showing.
Proofreading still matters. Excellence still matters. Respect for the audience still matters. But erasing humanity in pursuit of polish does not.
Long live the typo. Not because mistakes are good marketing, but because humanity still is.
