I don’t have a gift for spotting AI-generated prose. I’ve seen the same mistakes so many times that three sentences is usually enough, and they’re the same mistakes I strip out when I keep AI prose human in my own work.
I don’t care whether a tool helped with your draft. I care that so many people publish whatever the machine hands them and call it done, because readers catch these same mistakes and stop trusting the writer behind them. A person willing to do the work can fix every one of them, and this is what they look like.
What Are the Dead Giveaways of AI Content?
AI content announces itself through patterns that no human writer would produce naturally. Once you learn to see them, you can’t unsee them. For more, see how to build characters that feel real and why your characters feel flat.
If a sentence sounds like something you’d never actually say to another person, rewrite it.Share on X
Throat-clearing openers. “In today’s fast-paced digital landscape” or “Effective communication is essential for sustainable growth.” These sentences say nothing. They exist because the AI needs a running start. Cut the first paragraph of any AI draft. The real article usually starts in paragraph two.
AI content announces itself through patterns that no human writer would produce naturally.
I’d cut that opener from a client’s draft without asking. A reader who wades through a paragraph of nothing learns in the first ten seconds that the writer doesn’t respect their time, and plenty of them leave before the real article ever starts.
Passive voice everywhere. “It’s suggested that” instead of “I suggest.” “It should be noted that” instead of just noting it. AI defaults to passive construction because it has no author to put in the subject position. Fix this by asking who’s doing the action and putting them first.
Emotional flatness. AI can describe emotions but can’t produce them. “We faced significant fundraising challenges, which taught us resilience” has no human in it. Compare that to “When we lost the seed round, I sat in the car and stared at the steering wheel until my hands stopped shaking.” The first is a summary. The second is a scene. AI produces summaries. Humans produce scenes.
This is the one that makes me angriest, because the flattened version always comes from somewhere real. Somebody lost that seed round. When a writer lets the machine summarize a moment like that into a word like “resilience,” the one part worth reading gets thrown away.
Synonym cycling. AI avoids repeating words by rotating through synonyms that no human would use interchangeably. “Leverage,” “use,” “harness,” and “employ” all appearing within two paragraphs about the same concept. Pick one word and use it. Repetition is fine. Thesaurus abuse is worse.
The bullet-point crutch. AI loves lists because lists are easy to generate and hard to get wrong. If your article has more than two bulleted lists, something went wrong. Convert lists to prose. “Three things matter here: X, Y, and Z” reads better than three bullets and forces you to explain the relationship between the items.
Identical paragraph structure. Topic sentence, explanation, example, transition. Topic sentence, explanation, example, transition. Over and over. Real writing varies its rhythm. Some paragraphs are one sentence. Some are six. The variation makes prose feel alive.
How Do You Make AI Content Sound Human?
Read it out loud. This is the single most effective test. If you stumble over a phrase, trip on a transition, or hear yourself slipping into a monotone, the writing is broken. Your ear catches problems your eyes skip over. If a sentence sounds like something you’d never say to another person, rewrite it.
Add one specific detail per section. AI writes in generalities because it has no experiences to draw from. “The meeting went poorly” is AI. “The CFO closed his laptop mid-sentence and walked out” is human. You don’t need to turn every paragraph into a memoir. One concrete detail per section is enough to ground the writing in reality. See the full Writing Hub for related guides.
Cut the setup, keep the point. AI buries its best content under introductory paragraphs, context-setting, and qualifications. Find the sentence where the actual information starts and delete everything above it. Then check whether the deleted material contained anything the reader needed. Usually it didn’t.
Replace “this is important” language with evidence. AI tells you things matter without showing you why. “It’s essential to maintain consistent communication” is a claim. “After three weeks of silence from leadership, two senior engineers put in their notice” is evidence. Evidence is always more persuasive than assertion.
Fix the transitions. AI transitions sound like a tour guide: “Now let’s explore,” “Let’s dive into,” “Moving on to.” Real transitions connect ideas. The last sentence of one section should make the reader want the first sentence of the next. If you need “Let’s dive in” to get there, the sections aren’t connected well enough.
Kill the conclusion that restates the article. AI always ends with a summary paragraph that repeats everything you just read. Readers don’t need this. End with your strongest point, a specific recommendation, or a question that stays with the reader. If your conclusion could be deleted without losing anything, delete it.
| AI giveaway | What it looks like | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| Throat-clearing opener | “In today’s fast-paced digital landscape” | Cut the first paragraph; the article usually starts in paragraph two |
| Passive voice | “It should be noted that” | Ask who’s doing the action and put them first |
| Emotional flatness | “Taught us resilience” summaries | Write the scene, with a human and a moment in it |
| Synonym cycling | Leverage, use, harness and employ in two paragraphs | Pick one word and use it |
| Bullet-point crutch | More than two bulleted lists | Convert lists to prose that explains the relationship |
| Identical paragraph structure | Topic, explanation, example, transition, repeated | Vary rhythm: some paragraphs one sentence, some six |
| Tour-guide transitions | “Let’s dive into,” “Moving on to” | End each section so the reader wants the next |
| Restating conclusion | A summary of everything just read | End with your strongest point, a recommendation or a question |
People bring me books they wrote with AI that turned out to be crap and ask me to fix them. It’s a big market, and I don’t think it should have to be one. Each fix in this section costs an author an afternoon, and skipping them costs the book its readers.
The editing pass that turns an AI draft into prose readers trust, starting with reading it aloud.
My take
Ears catch what eyes skip, so read the draft aloud first. Then cut the setup and start where the information starts. Put one concrete detail in every section, like the CFO closing his laptop mid-sentence and walking out. Replace claims that something matters with evidence that it does. Delete the conclusion that repeats the article. Each fix costs an afternoon. Skip them and the book costs you its readers.
Why does AI content still feel empty after editing?
Most advice about humanizing AI content stops at cosmetic fixes like contractions, a few more uses of “you,” and a rhetorical question dropped in for flavor. Those help a little, and I think anyone selling them as the whole answer is selling a shortcut that doesn’t exist. AI has nothing to say. It can arrange words competently around a topic, but it has no perspective, no experience, and no stake in whether the reader gets anything out of the page.
The fix for that is knowing what you want to say before you start generating.
Use AI to organize your thinking, research your topic, and produce a rough structure. Then write the article yourself, or at minimum, rewrite every paragraph until it contains something only you could have written. If you can’t point to a single sentence in the piece that reflects your specific knowledge or experience, the article isn’t yours yet.
Back in 2024 I thought AI was fine for drafting short LinkedIn posts, because those weren’t going anywhere but LinkedIn. I’d give it a filter telling it which style to write in, instead of letting it figure that out. The one rule was that you edit the result so it doesn’t read like AI. People read a post and forget it in 15 minutes, but it still builds awareness in the back of their heads.
AI is a tool, and a good one when you treat it like one. Hand it the organizing and the research and it’ll save you days. Hand it your voice and you’ll publish something nobody remembers, and I think that’s a lousy trade for any author who had something real to say.
For help turning AI-drafted content into something that sounds like a human wrote it, get in touch.
AI content feels real when a person stays in charge of the thinking. The Birth of the Augmented Human is my book on using AI properly so it amplifies your judgment instead of replacing it.
