🏴‍☠️ 9 Tells that out AI writing, plus a fix

I can smell AI writing from across the room, and it grates on me every single time. So when someone who writes about AI for a living confessed that he hates the machine-written stuff too, I stopped scrolling and read his whole post twice. He keeps a running file of the small tics that quietly give computer-generated text away.

Forget the old em dash panic: that ship has sailed. The models got trained on em dashes, so now careful writers get falsely accused of faking it just for writing clean sentences. The real tells are sneakier, and the author catalogs nine of them, each one paired with a fast human fix you can apply in seconds.

Here is why this is worth a few minutes of your attention: once you see these nine patterns, you cannot unsee them. Your own drafts start reading like a bot, and now you catch the tics before they ship. I started my own list the same afternoon, and watching the model flag its bad habits felt like a small win.

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The nine tells you cannot unsee

The list reads like a confession. First up, the fake antithesis: 'That's not compliance. That's stalling.'

Cut the setup, keep the payoff.

Then come the stitched fragments, the 'Fast. Simple. No fluff' staccato that no human talks in.

Pick one word and commit. The self-applause is the tell that gets me every time, lines like 'and that matters' that exist only to pat the writing on the back.

A few of these sting because I have done them. The always-three rhythm is one: 'faster, cheaper, smarter.' Real life hands you two reasons or five, never a tidy trio.

The soft range is the sneakiest one. '5 to 10 minutes' means you never timed it, so say seven minutes and sound like someone who did the thing. Stack on the warm-up filler and the comparison nobody can follow, and the reader feels the gears turning.

What struck me is how these are not grammar mistakes. Each one is a shortcut the model reaches for when it wants to sound confident without committing to anything. That is why they feel hollow: there is no real choice behind them.

The two-word trick that strips most of the sludge

Spotting the tells is half the job. The clever half is forcing the model to write clean from the very first token. The expert's move here is almost too simple to trust.

Type 'Use ASD-STE100' into your prompt. That is the writing standard for aircraft maintenance manuals: short words, short sentences, because a confusing line in a plane manual can get people killed. Claude already knows it, and so do ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok.

The creator claims those two words strip out about 80 percent of the bad writing on their own. I tried it mid-read. The difference was not subtle.

What sold me was the reason behind the standard, not the trick itself. It is built so a stressed mechanic at 3 a. m.

cannot misread it. Borrow that constraint and your reader never has to work to understand you.

One caveat made me trust him more. He ran the standard on a poem and it came out unreadable, then on a LinkedIn post that ended up 'sounding German.' Use it for guides, steps, emails, and documents.

Switch it off for anything creative.

Reading the trick takes ten seconds. Building the reflex takes reps, and that is the part nobody schedules, so I have been running short daily ones in 3 Minute AI, where each lesson ends in a chat lab you type into instead of a summary you skim. Two full courses are free, so the ask is basically zero.

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Why it works as a loop, not a magic prompt

Here is the part that sold me. This is not one perfect prompt. It is a system that compounds.

The aircraft standard nails simplicity, brevity, and clarity, but it forgets humanity. So the author bolts on four lines of Zinsser: simplicity, brevity, clarity, humanity. Then he builds a forbidden file listing all nine tells and tells the model to check every draft against it.

Each week he adds a fresh tic he caught, and the file gets sharper. That is the quiet genius of it: a personal style guide that learns the exact things you get wrong. Generic advice cannot do that.

Think about what that means over a month. The tool stops being a generic word machine and starts sounding like your editor. Most prompt tips fade in a week; this one gets better the longer you use it.

One more habit matters. Long chats drift back toward the pretty, fluffy sentences as the model repeats itself, so start a new one sooner than feels necessary. When your window feels half full, open a fresh chat and paste your files back in.

I started my own forbidden file the same afternoon. Watching the model flag its own 'and that matters' habit was strange proof that the loop works.

Open your last draft and hunt for the nine tics on the list, then delete every fake antithesis, tidy trio, and ending that just repeats what you already said.

For the two-word trick, the forbidden file, and the reset habit that keeps your voice intact, read the full breakdown.

Worth 10 minutes if you want your writing to stop sounding like a machine and start sounding like you again.

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