Say What? The Most Expensive Typos in History
From NASA’s $80 million missing hyphen to a copy of the Bible that encouraged readers to commit adultery, there have been some pretty major goofs made in the printed word over the centuries. According to this post, probably the biggest error came when a trading firm accidentally sold 610,000 shares of stock at 1 yen per share… instead of the 610,000 yen per share that the stock was trading at. If these sound bad, though, there are some mistakes that have happened over the years that were possibly even worse.
The New Typo: Confident AI Errors
Typos haven’t gone away. They’ve just gotten some new company. AI writing tools rarely misspell a word, but they can make a different kind of mistake: a wrong date, a made-up statistic, a quote nobody said or a product detail that’s just slightly off, all delivered in perfectly polished sentences. Those errors are harder to spot precisely because the writing around them looks so clean.
A few habits that still save the day, whether a human or a machine wrote the first draft:
- Read it out loud. Your ear catches what your eyes skim past.
- Check every number, name and date against the original source, not against the draft.
- Get a second set of eyes on anything that’s public, permanent or expensive to fix, like a press release, a print run, a contract or a price.
- Don’t trust spell-check or AI to proofread themselves. They’re helpful tools, not a final review.
Need a professional proofreader or an editor to check your AI-assisted drafts? See our copy editing services and our editing for AI-generated content.