27 ways AI gives itself away

writing checklist

People say AI writing sounds generic and stop there, which is no help to anyone. It is not vague. It is a specific set of sentence shapes, words and habits that repeat. Once you can name them you cannot stop seeing them, and you can hand the list to the model and tell it to stop.

Two things here. The list, so you can spot it in your own drafts. And at the bottom, the whole thing condensed into a rules file you paste into your AI project once.

Read this before the list. Every single item below is also something good human writers do. A rule of three is not a crime. One em dash is not evidence. The tell is never one instance, it is the density — five of these in three paragraphs, and the same five again in the next piece. Judge the concentration, not the occurrence. Anyone telling you a single em dash proves machine authorship is selling certainty they do not have.

five groups, twenty-seven tells

Sentence shapes — 1 to 8
Words — 9 to 13
The shape of the answer — 14 to 19
What the content does — 20 to 24
Typography — 25 to 27

group one

Sentence shapes

The most reliable group. These are structures the model reaches for because they produce the feeling of an argument without needing one.

Negative parallelism

It's not about posting more. It's about posting better.

The shape promises a correction and delivers a synonym. It sounds like a distinction has been drawn. Nothing was drawn. This is the single most common tell in social content.

The rule of three, every time

It's simple, powerful, and repeatable.

Three adjectives, three examples, three clauses. Real thinking produces one point sometimes and four other times. When every list is exactly three items long, the length is coming from rhythm rather than from the subject.

Anaphora

You know the feeling. You know the silence. You know what comes next.

Three consecutive sentences opening with the same word. Powerful once a year. Exhausting once a paragraph.

Asyndeton stacking

Short. Punchy. Relentless.

Fragments, no conjunctions, full stops doing the work of commas. It imitates emphasis. Used more than once in a piece it becomes a tic that flattens everything to the same volume.

False ranges

Everything from strategy to storytelling.

The construction claims a spectrum with two endpoints. Check whether the two things named are actually the ends of anything. Usually they are just two things.

Correlative pileups

Not only does it save time, but it also builds trust.

Grammatically fine, and models produce it several times more often than people do. Two clauses joined by “and” almost always reads better.

The comparative close

That wasn't the end. That was the beginning.

Ending on a reversal. It feels like a landing. It is the same move as number one, shifted to the last line so you notice it less.

The rhetorical question opener

Ever wonder why some people make it look easy?

Nobody has ever wondered that in those words. The question is not seeking an answer, it is buying a sentence before the content starts.

group two

Words

The vocabulary

delve · leverage · robust · seamless · elevate · unlock · harness · navigate · landscape · realm · tapestry · testament · underscore · crucial · pivotal · meticulous · comprehensive · game-changer · deep dive

None of these is a bad word. All of them appear at rates far above how often people actually type them.

Elegant variation

The extension is fast. The tool is free. The utility runs on any page.

Refusing to repeat a noun, so one thing becomes four names across four sentences. Human writers repeat the word because repeating it is clearer. This is a school rule the model learned too well.

Promotional adjectives

a rich, vibrant community and an invaluable resource

Brochure words: stunning, breathtaking, unparalleled, seamless. They tell you how to feel about the thing instead of describing it. If you cannot photograph it, it is probably one of these.

Editorialising adverbs

Importantly, this changes everything. Notably, it is also free.

Each one instructs the reader that what follows matters, which is a job the sentence should be doing on its own.

Verb inflation

It serves as a testament to the power of consistency.

Consistency works.

Avoiding the verb “to be”. Three words where one was available, and slightly grander every time.

group three

The shape of the answer

Outline-shaped prose

Heading, three bullets, heading, three bullets, heading, three bullets. It is a plan for writing something, formatted as though it were the thing. The joins between the points are missing, and the format is what hides that they are missing.

The summary close

In conclusion, building an audience takes time, consistency and patience.

Or “overall”, or “to sum up”, or a final paragraph that restates the previous ones in shorter form. Nobody who has read four paragraphs needs a fifth telling them what the four said.

The significance close

… cementing its place as a cornerstone of modern marketing.

The last line reaches for a wider meaning the piece did not earn. Models do this because an ending feels unfinished otherwise.

Bold in the middle of sentences

The real secret is that consistency beats talent every time.

Two or three bolded phrases per paragraph, scattered, marking nothing consistent. Emphasis applied everywhere is emphasis applied nowhere. Look at where the bold falls: if it sits on the phrase that sounds most important rather than the one carrying new information, it was decoration.

Title Case On Everything

How To Build An Audience From Scratch

Headings capitalised like a document template, in contexts where nobody writing by hand would do it.

Emoji as bullet points

🚀 Post daily 💡 Reply fast ✅ Stay consistent

One per line, in content where you would otherwise use none. The emoji is not communicating, it is filling the visual slot where a bullet would go.

group four

What the content does

Harder to spot and worth more than everything above, because these survive a style edit.

Vague attribution

Studies show that most people decide in the first three seconds.

A claim borrowing authority from a source that is never named, because there is no source. Ask which studies. There is no answer.

Manufactured significance

This shift represents a fundamental change in how we think about work.

Telling you the subject is important rather than showing you anything about it. Delete the sentence and nothing is lost, which is how you know.

Forced both-sidesing

Of course, this approach has its critics.

Every point immediately balanced by a counterpoint of identical weight. Real writers have positions. Perfect symmetry is not fairness, it is the avoidance of having one.

Hollow specificity

Three out of four creators struggle with consistency.

Numbers that sound concrete and resolve to nothing. Which three? Measured how? The precision is texture, not evidence.

Restating the question

You're asking about how to build an audience without a large following.

Yes. That is what you asked. This is the model warming up in public.

group five

Typography

The weakest signals on the list, and the ones most often treated as proof. Use them to confirm a suspicion, never to form one.

Curly quotes and apostrophes

Here’s what I’d say, and it “works”.

Typographic quotes appearing where you would have typed straight ones: a chat message, a caption, a plain text box. It means the text was composed somewhere else and pasted in. Somewhere else is not always a model, but it is always somewhere else.

Unspaced em dashes

It worked—eventually—but not the way I expected.

The em dash is not a tell. Plenty of people use it well and have for decades. What is mildly diagnostic is the pattern: three or four in a short piece, each doing a comma's job, typed without spaces by someone whose keyboard has no em dash key.

Paragraphs of suspiciously even length

Four paragraphs, each three sentences, each about the same width on screen. Human drafts are lumpy: a one-line paragraph sits next to a seven-line one because that is how the thinking came out. Uniformity is a rendering, not a draft.

The one I catch myself on is number 2. Three of anything just feels finished. Now I count them, and about a third of the time the third item was only there to make the rhythm land.

now make it useful

The rules file

Reading the list changes your editing. Loading it changes your drafts. Paste this into your AI project knowledge, your custom instructions, or the top of a writing session.

anti-pattern rules — load once per project

WRITING RULES: PATTERNS TO AVOID

These are prohibitions, not preferences. Breaking one is an
error, not a stylistic choice. If following one of these
makes a sentence worse, rewrite the sentence - do not keep
the pattern.

SENTENCE SHAPES - banned

- Negative parallelism. Never "it's not X, it's Y" or "this
  isn't about X. It's about Y." State the thing directly.
- The rule of three as a default. Vary list length. If a
  list has three items, it is because there are three.
- Three or more consecutive sentences opening with the same
  word.
- Fragment stacking for emphasis. "Short. Punchy. Sharp."
- False ranges: "from X to Y" unless X and Y are genuine
  ends of a real spectrum.
- "Not only... but also". Use "and".
- Closing on a reversal: "It's not a bug, it's a feature."
- Opening on a rhetorical question.

WORDS - banned

delve, leverage, robust, seamless, elevate, unlock, harness,
navigate, landscape, realm, tapestry, testament, underscore,
crucial, pivotal, meticulous, comprehensive, game-changer,
deep dive, invaluable, unparalleled, vibrant, breathtaking,
importantly, notably, crucially, significantly, interestingly

Do not substitute synonyms of the same register. The problem
is the flavour, not the specific word.

Use the verb "to be". Never "serves as", "stands as a
testament to", "plays a vital role in" where "is" works.

Repeat a noun rather than reaching for a synonym. If it is
an extension, call it the extension every time.

STRUCTURE - banned

- Heading-plus-three-bullets as the default layout. Write
  paragraphs unless the content is genuinely a list.
- Any closing paragraph that summarises the preceding ones.
  No "in conclusion", "overall", "to sum up".
- Any closing line that asserts wider significance:
  "cementing its place as", "a reminder that", "in a world
  where".
- Bold inside sentences. Bold a whole line or nothing.
- Title Case headings. Sentence case.
- Emoji used as bullet points.

CONTENT - banned

- "Experts say", "studies show", "research suggests",
  "many argue". Name the source or drop the claim.
- Sentences whose only function is to assert that the topic
  matters.
- Balancing every point with an equal counterpoint. Take a
  position.
- Invented statistics and precise-sounding numbers with no
  source.
- Restating my question before answering it.

RHYTHM

Vary paragraph length deliberately. A one-sentence paragraph
next to a six-sentence one. Never four paragraphs of
identical size.

BEFORE YOU GIVE ME THE DRAFT

Read it back against this list. Name the three rules you
were most at risk of breaking, and quote the line where you
avoided each one. If you broke one on purpose, say which and
why.

The last section is the part that matters. Without it the model reads the rules and writes as it was going to. Asking it to name the near-misses forces it to check its own output against the file, and it hands you a diagnosis you can verify in ten seconds.

the honest caveat

Avoiding all 27 does not make it yours

Strip every pattern here and you get writing with no tells and no author. Clean, competent, nobody home. The list removes what makes text read as machine-made. It cannot add what makes it read as you.

That part is a different job, and it needs different material: the things you actually think, in the words you actually use, about the things you have actually done. The model cannot supply any of that. It can only stop burying it.

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