Authors, colleagues, even friends send me AI writing all the time. They think I can’t tell, but I can.
It’s not the predictable things. I’m not about to waste my time complaining about the em dashes that magazine editors love. And by now, we all know the obvious hackneyed cliches, including “It’s not this, it’s that” and “from X to Y” constructions, or short sentence fragments stacked up.
I’m not talking about the garden-variety writing problems like passive sentences, dangling modifiers, jargon, wordiness, and unclear antecedents that editors like me are trained to hunt down and eliminate.
It’s the subtle things, including:
Word choice: The GenXer who uses Millennial or Gen Z speak without irony, like “land,” “cringe,” “circle back,” and “take a beat.” The vocabulary that looks beyond someone’s reading level or the usage that only a literature major, engineer, or data scientist would appreciate.
Announced transitions: The tell is when the sentence starts with “this.” “This is where AI starts to make sense.” Reading so much AI writing that lazily starts with “this” has infected my own writing. I now rigorously attempt to edit it out.
Revelation framing: People say the most ordinary things as if they were the second coming. “The truth is both counterintuitive and troubling.” It’s a dramatic technique borrowed from fiction we need less of in nonfiction.
Importance without evidence: Why something matters in the abstract rather than in the real world. “This is why Swiss cheese matters for the cloud.”
Layered hedging: The pile-up of qualifications begins to accumulate like silt drifting downstream. “It can be argued that AI somewhat improves communication, but only up to a degree.”
If it feels like I’m making up these examples, some of the above come from my own reading of AI-generated writing authors send me to work with, at greater expense for them, and also from the guidance of AI company clients who have banned these cliches in the writing they hire me to do.
My college-age son sent me a wonderful research report he wrote studying forest ecology. My first reaction was to ask if it was written with AI. It wasn’t. His friends think he uses AI, because it’s written too well. It’s the curse of competence.
This post was not written with AI. I spell-checked it, and that’s it. It was not even run through Claude to check for logical inconsistencies. You are reading exactly what I wrote.
Many people use AI to speed up the writing process, and I’ve posted many times about how that’s helpful. But an increasing number clients want their writing to be copyrighted and published by sophisticated publishers and companies that demand AI-free writing, and they hire me. They are learning how much AI changes their writing style, sometimes for the worse.
The source of advantage in thought leadership is author-plus-collaborator interaction. You will know the difference in the writing when you’ve experienced it. The writing sounds like a human.