Let's Embrace Imperfection

Image was created uisng AI!!

Why Human Error is Our Greatest Asset in the Age of AI

I was driving home from work today listening to the Diary of a CEO podcast with Steven Bartlett interviewing one of my favourite inspirational speakers, Simon Sinek. They were talking about AI and its influence on society and the general good and bad. Then Simon said something that was really profound with me, he started to talk about “The value of Human Error”. This really got me questioning how I view human mistakes.

I have always believed in my teaching that making mistakes is a good thing (to be clear I still beleive this!). Now up until today, before hearing this podcast, I fundamentally encouraged children I taught to be confident to make mistakes and always encouraged failure. This was because I believe that failure and making mistakes progresses learning; you learn from your mistakes, and again, I still believe this! However, now I realise that human error is so much more than this. Human error is going to be what distinguishes us as humans from Artificial Intelligence.

I actually tested this with this very blog post.

It started as a brain dump on a Voice Note, while driving home after hearing that profound statement from Simon Sinek. I then took the transcript from this brain dump and fed it into Gemini to create a blog post. I asked it to sound like me, and lo and behold it produced a perfect blog post from my brain dump. It was perfect; it articulated what I had said exactly. And I thought about posting it, however, I then thought “Hang on, I’m contradicting the whole point of this post.” I’m using AI to come up with a completely inhuman article that was not written by me, just formulated from what I had said on my brain dump recording. Now, I think there is a real benefit to this kind of smart working, but in the case of this blog post, no, it wasn’t right. I wanted it to be human.

So, I tried a second experiment. I asked the AI to write my post, make it sound like me, but add some mistakes. Well, it did not make the mistakes well. The mistakes were so fake and it was so clear and obvious that it was clearly not human!

This whole experience got me rethinking my own work. As a teacher, I would constantly point out spelling mistakes and grammatical errors in children’s writing and always ask them to correct them. I was the world’s best in spotting when a child had not used a capital letter or full stop correctly. But now I’m rethinking this. In the age of AI, should we now as educators encourage these mistakes because these mistakes make them human? Perhaps point them out, but not correct them? Shouldn’t we be identifying the humanisation of writing, and finding these errors in a human way will allow this?

If an AI can achieve grammatical perfection in a nanosecond, what should we be spending our time on?

• Are we so focused on correcting every comma that we are missing the chance to celebrate a student's unique, messy, human voice?

• By demanding perfection, are we inadvertently telling students that their authentic, error-prone work is less valuable than the sterile perfection of a machine?

• Should our focus shift from "correctness" to "authenticity"? From flawless prose to brave ideas?

The last of these suggestions is something I tend to always do. My spelling and grammar are atrocious - thank goodness for AI - you sense the irony!

So what if we taught them more about failure? What if we valued their messy, authentic, human writing a bit more? It’s a change in mindset, I know. But it might just be the most important one we need to make. It’s about making our work purposefully and authentically human.

Anyway. Just a thought. What do you think?