An article in defense of messy content in an increasingly NPC world

Sometimes the internet feels…. uncanny.

There’s a certain type of post I’ve noticed recently that makes me shudder a little. “Here’s what no one tells you about failure…” Cue sh*tty Canva graphic. Cue flawless CTA that sounds like it was written by someone’s who’s never actually failed at anything, ever. 

I don’t trust it. Not because it’s wrong. Because it’s too freaking right.

There’s a weird sheen on these posts. They’re too polished. Too perfect. Like the digital version of some freaky silicon doll (yeah, those ones.)

The heeby-jeebies have officially been added to my online inventory.

Because it’s starting to feel like the internet is haunted af. And in this weird, content-saturated, AI-obsessed landscape, perfection is now a red flag.

This is what I like to call The Copy Paste Crisis.

The Uncanny Content Era.

The Automation Aesthetic.

It’s an age of “who actually wrote this?” suspicion. Was it ChatGPT? A ghostwriter? A vibes team? A guy named Mitch in marketing with a Notion template and an espresso addiction?

What does this mean? Well, it means the new credibility metric is chaos.

And I don’t mean Duolingo Nutter Butter chaos. Y’all know I have my… reservations about them folk. I mean a rogue typo (or three). A screenshot with a timestamp. A post that feels a little too much like oversharing after three dirty martinis and a long pull of a Marlboro Red.

Why? Well, to put it simply, it’s 2025. And no one wants to be seen as a bot. And mistakes are exactly how you prove you aren’t one.

Internet users, particularly those who suffer from being Chronically Online, have developed a new fear. Not spiders. Not climate change. Not even capitalism (although… yeah.)

The great modern fear is being perceived as an NPC (ya know, a non-player character).

Someone who just blindly follows trends. Who posts beige. Who has no original thought. Who could be an AI clone trained on LinkedIn carousels and Instagram infographics. The horror.

This in tandem with the oversaturation of AI slop on everyone’s feeds has led to an interesting phenomenon I’ve observed as of late: imperfection as identity.

People are canning practices such as correct capitalisation and the polished (wanky) PR voice, and instead leaning into intentional typos, posting screenshots of unedited notes, and writing almost as if texting a friend.

Because the more your content looks like it couldn’t have been written by a bot, the more “real” you appear.

And in a world full of auto-generated landfillcore, being real is the top currency.

Now now, let me be clear here: I’m not saying everybody become illiterate and start alphabet souping all over the place. Take it with a pinch of salt, baby, before you ruin the whole dish.

What I am saying, is that we’ve overcorrected. Content used to be messy and fun. Then it got SEO’d and spell-checked into oblivion. Every post became a mini TED Talk. Every caption started sounding like it had 3 rounds of legal review.

But people trust people. Not polish. Not templates. Not perfection. So when your post is a little off (a lowercase “i” here, a rogue comma there), it reminds the reader that there’s a real, thinking, distracted, occasionally over-caffeinated human behind it.

A mistake is not a flaw. It’s texture. It’s proof of life.

The brands and creators killing it online right now? They're not obsessively editing. They're not running every sentence through Hemingway App and Grammarly Pro Plus Ultra. They’re sounding like people. Okay maybe slightly chaotic, very online people.

People with weird word choices and run-on sentences. People who type “literally sobbing” when they are not, in fact, sobbing. Because the truth is, perfection is alienating. It signals committee. Or AI. Or at best, marketing. And we are all collectively allergic to being marketed to right now.

But of course, we’re not going to merely rant about this without a cheat code (who do you think I am darling?).

So, here’s my official guide on how to be a little more real online (without sounding like a Hotmail scam.)

• Leave in one typo. Just one. Sprinkle it like salt. Not too much. Just enough to make people think, “Hmm. Human.”

• Stop capitalising every word in your caption. unless you’re going for drama. then do it on purpose.

• Write like you talk. Even if that means starting a sentence with “also lol.”

• Let your tone shift mid-thought. Content that’s too “on brand” is often too off-putting.

• Use weirdly specific examples. The weirder the better. Be your own data point.

• Don’t edit the freaking life out of your voice. Your typos, side comments, double parentheses: they’re not clutter. They’re character.

Think of it this way: if your post could plausibly be generated by a SaaS platform named “Contently.ai,” maybe it needs a little more chaos.

Proof of life > proof of concept

We spend so much time trying to sound smart, smooth, scalable. But in doing so, we lose the very thing that makes content work in the first place: connection.

You don’t need to be perfect to be credible. You don’t need to sound like Harvard Business Review to be worth listening to.

Sometimes, the thing that makes someone stop scrolling is the imperfection. The typo. The lowercase sigh. The moment that makes them go, “Oh… there’s a person here.”

Get a little weird with it. Because being real will always beat being right (in my humble opinion anyway.)

-Sophie Randell, Writer