In an era where artificial intelligence increasingly permeates our digital landscape, distinguishing between human-crafted prose and machine-generated text has become both a crucial skill and a fascinating challenge.
Did your eyelids get heavy reading that sentence? You have generative AI to thank.
I asked my AI companion, Claude, to write an intro, and, on cue, it spit out a classic piece of AI hawk tuah.
With all due respect to Claude, because we get along pretty well, your writing can be as dry as last night’s chicken.
And I can’t tell you how hard I tried not to ask you for ten better analogies than that.
But let’s dissect that first sentence for a second because it possesses many telltale signs that a robot wrote it. Here are a few:
- “In an era,” AI likes to start all intros like it’s narrating a movie trailer. Some other favorites: “In the fast-paced environment of” and “In today’s world.”
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AI loves it some adjectives, especially compound adjectives with hyphens like “human-crafted” and “machine-generated.” It just can’t get enough of those thought-provoking descriptions.
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Complex sentences are AI’s jam. It can never just be one thing with AI “Crucial skill” alone won’t do. Oh no, it also has to be a “fascinating challenge.”
Ernest Hemingway, AI is not.
Related: How Can AI Help in Content Creation?
Artificial flavoring
I’ve been working with AI long enough to spot its sneaky ways, its tendencies, its patterns, its likes and dislikes.
Inadvertently, I’ve become somewhat of an AI profiler, hoping to track it down like a sociopath before it suffocates its next bit of prose.
If this writing thing doesn’t work out, there may be a job for me in the AI Behavioral Analysis Unit. (Btw, Grammarly just informed me it didn’t like the construction of that last sentence. Cram it Grammarly, this is my article.)
How did I get here?
Over the past few months, I’ve been taking a “deep dive” (one of AI’s favorite phrases) into generative AI to prep for an online class I’m teaching on Sunday, October 20, called: Meet Your New Writing Partner: Generative AI
The masterclass will offer tips on using AI to make your writing process more productive, creative, and efficient.
And guess who just wrote that complex sentence?
Now, it may be counterintuitive that I’m teaching a class about a technology I love to hate. But here’s the rub—for all its annoyingness, generative A.I. can be super helpful.
To use one of AI’s favorite words: It’s invaluable.
Think of it as hiring a very smart intern who just graduated from Duke to be your assistant. They know a lot and are fast learners— but they need direction.
In the class, I will teach you what I’ve learned to make AI my very smart intern from Duke.
What I won’t do is teach you how to make AI your writer. Why? Because it’s not there yet. It may be there one day, but it has some serious habits it needs to break.
I suspect many professional editors and teachers have read enough good human writing over the years to spot a fraud. Others may know something smells off but aren’t sure if it’s them or something rotten in the fridge.
So, to give you a head start, here are some surefire AI giveaways
Related: The AI Detector Dilemma
AI Be Like
1. Power words
Sometimes, I think AI was trained by the head of marketing at Nike. It seems to revel in using the advertising-speak that infiltrates popular media but that no one ever uses in real life.
Words to be aware of/beware of:
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Revolutionize
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Game-Changing
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Innovative
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Groundbreaking
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Testament to
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Elevate
2. Metaphorical Words
AI so badly wants to be evocative. It yearns to speak in a way that touches the heart of its readers through vivid imagery. It’s the Tin Man looking for a heart. Look out for words like:
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Tapestry
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Mosaic
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Patchwork
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Symphony
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Collage
3. Clever Wordplay
Little known fact: AI was trained by joke book writers for 4th graders and Cosmo coverline writers from 1996. It loves to string together punny sentences, especially when it’s crafting headlines. It’s obsessed. OBSESSED with putting colons in long headlines, a practice that hasn’t been popular in newsrooms for 20 years.
Ask it to give your story a headline, and it will default to something like:
4. Terrible transitions
I get it. Most writing is plagued with awkward transitions, and they’re often one of the first things I have to edit when I’m working on a story. AI knows this, but it’s less certain how to fix it. You know AI is at work if you’re reading a story and suddenly get struck in the forehead by a clunker such as:
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Moreover
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Furthermore
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In addition to
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Conversely
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Nevertheless
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Therefore
5. Term paper conclusions
Just as AI likes to begin every story with “In a world,” it also enjoys telegraphing from miles away when you’re reaching the end of a story. It’s like it never graduated from high school English.
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In conclusion
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In summary
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Finally
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By and large
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On the whole
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Ultimately
6. Tech bro speak
Perhaps because it was created by tech bros, AI sounds a lot like a conversation you might overhear in a Silicon Valley boardroom. Tech bro speaks seeps into everything I ask it to do. Words such as:
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Leverage
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Pivot
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Holistic
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Resonate
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Enrich
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Navigate
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Multifaceted
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Testament
7. Makes simple words complicated
In AI land, “use” always has to be “utilize;” “important” has to be “critical.” For a chatbot, AI is a lot more formal than chatty and conversational. Here are some words it uses that nobody has ever said out loud:
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Delve
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Endeavor
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Crucial
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Insights
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Systemic
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Comprehensive
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Inherent
In conclusion, as long as readers want to stay awake while reading, writers are in no immediate danger of losing their jobs.
But writers who ignore AI or think it will go the way of Bitcoin are kidding themselves. That’s like refusing to trade in your typewriter for a computer or, a hundred years ago, insisting on using a quill and ink instead of a ballpoint pen.
AI will outlive us all. The issue is how to make it our companion and not our competitor.
Sign up for the “Meet Your New Writing Partner: Generative AI” workshop
