AI writing assistants are genuinely useful, but their output has a recognisable accent. Once you know the tells, you can’t unsee them — and you can edit them out to make AI-assisted drafts read like your own voice. Here are eleven of the most common signs, with practical fixes.
1. A flood of em dashes
The classic tell. AI text uses the em dash (—) several times more often than typical human writing. Fix: rebalance them — some become commas, some periods, some colons, a few stay. A grammar-aware cleaner does this without creating comma splices.
2. The “it’s not just X, it’s Y” construction
Negative parallelism is everywhere in AI prose: “It’s not just a tool, it’s a philosophy.” “This isn’t about speed — it’s about trust.” Fix: rewrite as a plain statement. Say what it is, once.
3. Signature vocabulary
Certain words spike in AI text: delve, tapestry, leverage, robust, realm, testament, navigate, underscore, foster, seamless, intricate, meticulous. Fix: swap for plainer words. “Delve into” becomes “look at”; “leverage” becomes “use”.
4. Cliché openers and closers
“In today’s fast-paced world…”, “In conclusion…”, “It’s worth noting that…”, “At the end of the day…”. Fix: cut them. They add words without adding meaning. Start with the actual point.
5. The rule of three, everywhere
Humans use tricolons occasionally for rhythm. AI uses them constantly: “clear, concise, and compelling.” Three-item lists in sentence after sentence. Fix: vary your structure; break some lists into two items or a single strong one.
6. Uniform sentence length
Human writing is bursty — short sentences next to long ones. AI tends toward a steady, medium rhythm. Fix: read aloud and deliberately add a few very short sentences. Like this. And one longer, winding sentence to contrast.
7. Curly “smart” quotes and apostrophes
When you paste AI text into plain fields, curly quotes (” ” ’ ’) often look out of place or break formatting. Fix: convert them to straight quotes (” ‘).
8. Invisible and zero-width characters
This one is sneaky. AI output and copied web text can carry invisible characters — zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces, sometimes used as hidden “watermarks”. You can’t see them, but they’re there. Fix: strip them. Our cleaner flags and removes them automatically.
9. Leftover Markdown
**Bold** markers, ## headings, and stray asterisks that didn’t render. A sign the text was generated in a Markdown context and pasted raw. Fix: remove the formatting characters.
10. Over-hedging
“It’s important to note”, “one might argue”, “generally speaking”, “in many cases”. Constant qualification makes writing feel evasive. Fix: state things directly. If a claim needs a caveat, give one specific caveat, not a blanket hedge.
11. The editorialising “-ing” tail
Sentences that end with a participial summary: “…driving innovation across the industry.” “…highlighting the importance of collaboration.” Fix: delete the tail or turn it into its own sentence with a concrete point.
How to fix them efficiently
You could hunt for all eleven by hand, but most of the mechanical ones — em dashes, smart quotes, ellipses, invisible characters, Markdown — can be cleaned in one pass. The judgement calls (vocabulary, sentence rhythm, hedging) are where your editing adds real value.
That’s the workflow we recommend: run the text through a cleaner to handle the mechanical tells and get an “AI-tell score” that flags the clichés and overused words, then make the human edits the score points you to. The goal isn’t to disguise anything — it’s to make your writing clear, natural, and genuinely yours.
A note on intent
Removing AI tells is about writing quality, not deception. Use AI to draft, then edit it into your own voice the same way you’d edit any first draft. Cleaner punctuation, plainer words, and varied rhythm make writing better for the reader — which is the whole point.