The Small Tells That Make Writing Look AI-Generated

Readers rarely decide that text is machine-written because of one sentence. They accumulate small signals, hit a threshold, and then reread everything with suspicion. The signals are surprisingly consistent, and most of them take seconds to fix.

Here is the field guide, roughly in order of how loudly each one announces itself.

Punctuation Habits

The em dash. Generated text loves it. Human writers use it too, but not three times in four paragraphs. If you find a cluster, swap most of them for a comma, a full stop, or a colon and keep at most one.

Colons introducing everything. “Here’s the thing:” and “The result: better outcomes.” Occasionally fine. As a rhythm, distinctive in a bad way.

Perfectly balanced parentheses and semicolons. Human punctuation is inconsistent because human attention is inconsistent. Text where every optional mark is deployed correctly reads as machine-tidy.

Phrase Fingerprints

Some phrases have become so associated with generated text that readers flinch. In today’s fast-paced world. It’s important to note that. This isn’t just X, it’s Y. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned professional. Let’s dive in. At the end of the day. Navigating the complexities of.

There is nothing grammatically wrong with any of them. They are just heavily overrepresented, so they function as a signature. Delete them and check whether the sentence lost anything. It almost never did.

The same goes for the “not only, but also” construction and the habit of restating the heading as the first sentence of a section.

Structural Tells

Everything in threes. Three bullet points, three sentences per paragraph, three examples. Real writing has a list of two and a list of seven because that is how many things there were.

Perfectly parallel headings. If every heading is a gerund phrase of the same length, someone generated the outline. Break one on purpose.

The summary that repeats the article. Human writers stop when they run out of things to say. Generated writing circles back and recaps because it was trained on documents that do.

Uniform paragraph length. Scroll the page and squint. If the text blocks look like bricks, vary them.

Content Tells

The deepest tell is not stylistic at all. It is that the writing describes a topic without ever demonstrating contact with it.

Generated text says “communication challenges can arise during remote onboarding.” A person who has done remote onboarding says “the new hire could not get VPN access for four days and nobody wanted to own it.”

One concrete, unglamorous, slightly specific detail per section is the strongest de-AI edit there is, and it is also just better writing.

Before:

Effective stakeholder communication is essential during a migration. Teams should ensure that all parties are kept informed throughout the process. Regular updates help build confidence and reduce uncertainty. A clear communication plan is therefore highly recommended.

After:

During the migration, send one update a week even when nothing happened. The week we skipped it, three people asked separately whether the project had been cancelled. A short “still on track, next milestone Thursday” costs two minutes and prevents that.

What Not to Bother With

Do not chase AI detectors. They are unreliable in both directions and optimizing for them produces worse writing, not more human writing.

Do not deliberately add typos. Readers notice sloppiness faster than they notice smoothness, and it costs you credibility to buy authenticity you could get another way.

Do not avoid useful words because a blog post listed them. Sometimes “delve” is the right verb. Frequency is the tell, not vocabulary.

Fixing It in One Pass

A Wrivio Context for this could say:

Rewrite this so it reads like a person wrote it. Use at most one em dash in the whole text. Remove stock openers, hedging pairs, and any closing paragraph that restates what was already said. Vary sentence and paragraph length noticeably, including at least one very short sentence. Do not use exclamation marks. Do not invent facts, names, numbers, or examples, and keep every figure exactly as written.

Press Ctrl+Shift+Space, paste the draft, run it, then turn on Show changes. The diff matters here because the rewrite is aggressive about deletions, and occasionally it removes a hedge that was legally or factually necessary. Put those back.

Then do the part the tool cannot do: add the specific detail only you know.

Common Questions

Is any of this actually a problem, or just fashion?

Some of it is fashion and will shift. The content tell will not. Writing that shows no evidence of experience has always been weak, and readers have simply gotten faster at spotting it.

I write this way naturally. Should I change?

If you write clean, balanced, threes-everywhere prose by habit, you will occasionally be accused. Adding concrete detail protects you better than restyling does.

Does this apply to internal work messages?

Less so. A status update does not need voice. Save the effort for writing where a reader is deciding whether to trust you.

Download Wrivio for Windows to run a de-flattening pass on any draft, anywhere in Windows, with a diff that shows exactly what got cut.