Spot the AI

Structure

  • Symmetrical architecture (intro → 3 body → restated conclusion)
  • Paragraphs are roughly equal length
  • Every point gets equal weight — nothing lingers, nothing is rushed
  • Modular paragraphs — reorder them and nothing breaks

    Phrasing

  • “X isn’t Y — it’s Z” — definitional reframe presented as revelation, never defended
  • “Doesn’t X. Y’s.” — the same move in disguise, just split across two sentences
  • “Not X, but Y.” — another variant, same trick
  • Em dash overuse — two or more per paragraph, used as a universal joint between clauses
  • “Delve,” “tapestry,” “nuanced,” “landscape,” “multifaceted”
  • “It’s worth noting…” / “It’s important to remember…” before something obvious
  • “This raises important questions about…” without raising them
  • “In an era where…” as an opening move
  • Hollow intensifiers: “truly,” “genuinely,” “fundamentally” doing no work

    Tone

  • Diplomatically neutral throughout — no conviction, no edge
  • Compulsive both-sidesism (“on the other hand…”) as a structural reflex
  • Performative complexity — gestures at depth, commits to nothing
  • Summarizes consensus instead of arguing a position
  • Concludes with vague optimism or a call to “navigate” something

    Reasoning

  • Ideas are assembled, not developed — no tension, no struggle
  • No personal experience, anecdote, or idiosyncratic framing
  • Generic examples (the usual suspects)
  • Answers a question nobody actually asked in quite that way
  • Every ambiguity is resolved into clean, defanged clarity

    The actual content

  • Topic and angle feel like the first result for a prompt
  • Same examples everyone else uses (the usual suspects, but at the idea level)
  • Personal anecdotes that suspiciously serve the argument with no loose ends
  • No detail that would survive only in a real memory: odd, specific, slightly off-topic
  • Read ten of them and they blur together — the tell is in the aggregate, not any single piece

Write Like a Human

Have a center of gravity

Pick the thing you actually care about. Let it pull everything toward it, even if it makes the piece seem uneven. If every section feels equally important, none of them are.

Not everything has to be polished

Linger where you’re fascinated. Rush past what bores you. The reader will feel the difference between a mind at work and a machine filling space.

Commit, you can recover

It isn’t a problem to state something slightly too strong, then wrestle with the consequences. That tension is the thinking. Don’t hedge upfront, earn your nuance.

Use your own references

Connect your argument to something only you would connect it to. An anecdote or something that only you connect to.

Have the Freedom to leave things out

Trust the reader, skip the setup everyone already knows. Explaining only what needs to be explained is a signal that you respect your audience. And here you can really show your humanity, current AI lacks the ability to separate one from the other.

Let rhythm break

Short sentence. Then a long, winding one that delays its verb because you’re still working out what you mean. Monotone cadence is the deepest tell.

Stay unclear when the idea is unclear

If something is genuinely ambiguous, let the sentence be ambiguous. Forcing false clarity is a machine behavior.

Kill the “isn’t/is” move

If you ever catch yourself writing “X isn’t Y, it’s Z,” you might have found something interesting. Good. Now delete the sentence and write the argument that earns it.