Top 10 Ways to Recognize AI-Generated Writing

✨ Stop worrying about the emdash... 👀 The real secret to recognizing low-effort AI writing is the emojis as bullet points.

I keep seeing these posts about people who feel like they need to give up their favorite punctuation because all of the sudden it’s in AI writing. Before you give up your emdashes… here are a few other things you might want to avoid instead:

🧹 10. Overly Clean Structure
Everything is too organized—perfect paragraph spacing, rigid topic sentences, suspiciously neat transitions.

This is not my favorite way. I mean, some people can write a very nicely organized, formatted, dramatically correct, correctly spelled… However, if that’s not you, people will notice the shift and wonder.

My daughter teaches high school and claims the first sign of AI use is how a student how couldn’t spell their own name last week suddenly turns in a perfect paper.

🎭 9. Generic Voice
It sounds like someone is speaking... but no one specific. All style, no soul.

I’m not so sure about this one. Lately, it’s been a specific voice. I recognize it from those old time, noir-detective movies that talk about dames walking in with long legs and stuff. What it’s doing on my space station, or in King Arthur’s Court does leave me scratching my head and wondering if it would be quicker to write it myself than edit out the Dick Tracy (or whoever it’s supposed to be…)

📏 8. Repetitive Phrasing
Same phrases or sentence patterns sneak in over and over—because token prediction loves safety.

If you caught the post about my first story you might recognize this as perhaps not entirely AI. When I was 5 getting stuck on my latest new word was a human thing. Today AI has it’s favorite words too: hum, ozone, shards, fractals, cacophony, labyrinthine… each model or update may change the specific set of over-used words (And character names… please, please, PLEASE… name your own characters!)

🤖 7. Over-explaining Obvious Points
It treats the reader like they’ve never heard of common knowledge. ("Water is wet...")

Now, I haven’t seen “water is wet”… but I do see it trying to tie everything up with a nice bow and probably hit you over the head with a moral at the end of every story… way too much happily ever after and the world was at peace and the harmony and could someone please pass the insulin?

📚 6. Weird Formality Shifts
Mixing casual phrases with stiff academic words—like "thus, we totally see."

Personally, I haven’t notice this. But if I did I would probably think this was a poor writer and not necessarily AI doing it.

🎨 5. Lack of Specific Details
Descriptions float without real-world grounding. A forest has "trees," a city has "buildings"—no oak or graffiti or sizzling hot dog cart.

THIS… you can get AI to write your story, but it will all be generic stuff… or worse the most common tropes and cliches in your genre.

🔄 4. Overuse of "In Conclusion" Statements
Real humans rarely use “In conclusion...” unless it’s a high school essay.

Well, I haven’t used AI much in non-fiction, so I won’t comment here. I am seeing more and more articles that appear to have been written by AI, so it doesn’t hurt to be aware of the trends.

🌸 3. Emotional Flatness Hidden by Pretty Words
It says something is beautiful or heartbreaking... but you don’t feel it.

You also can’t smell it. Well, maybe YOU can smell it. I don’t. I have no idea what desperation or despair or heartbreak smell like. My AI loves to tell me what things smell like that I would never have guessed even had a smell. I think it’s secret desire is to get it’s very own nose so it can sniff around everywhere… at least that should give us some time to fight back when it becomes sentient and instead of launching the nukes it’s busy trying to smell the metal and danger they embody.

🚦 2. Over-Transitioning
"So," "thus," "however," "moreover"—piled up like a traffic jam at every paragraph turn.

Hmm… I’d say lack of transition. One paragraph your character is on the moon collecting rocks and the next he’s walking into the diner on 5th and main for your date… with absolutely no explanation of how he got back to earth so fast.

But the AI says this is a problem, so it must be true. Probably a non-fiction thing.

📋 1. Bullet Point Abuse with Random Emojis
✨ Points! 🚀 Everywhere! 🌿 Whether it makes sense or not! 🐙 Because sparkles! ✨

Specifically, ChatGPT has discovered emojis (and bold fonts…), and it loves them the way children love sweets. My number one “tell” for AI writing is the over-use of emojis.

So before you give up your favorite writing style in a doomed effort to prove yourself human, try getting rid of the fluff, the cliches, the vague or missing details, the random formatting… and the emojis *unless that’s really your style*…

And if you are writing with AI… please read it and edit it before you post.

DISCLAIMER: All the emojis in this article were generated by AI… along with the 10 headings and the initial line of text. Additional comments were inserted by a human (me).