The signs of AI writing, and how to not sound like AI
This is a craft guide, and the goal is honest: keep drafting with AI, but publish in a voice that is unmistakably yours. Here's what gives the machine away, and how to keep it out of your writing.
Machine-generated text published with the fingerprints still on it: recycled catchphrases, mirrored sentences, tidy lists of three, and confident-sounding insight that says nothing.
Readers got good at spotting it, fast. A single "delve" in a Reddit comment now draws an accusation. A reply on X shaped like "it's not luck, it's leverage" gets a community note in spirit if not in fact. People who read online every day have absorbed the house style of language models, and they flinch at it.
That's a real problem if you use AI the honest way: as a drafting partner, with your ideas and your final edit. Because the tells that mark a spam bot also mark you. From the outside, a thoughtful person publishing unedited AI prose and a bot farm posting a thousand comments an hour look exactly the same.
The fix starts with knowing precisely what the tells are, so you can catch them in your own drafts before anyone else does.
The tells that give it away
Word filters miss the point. "Delve" and "tapestry" are easy to ban, but the deeper tells live in the cadence and patterns AI falls back on.
This list isn't theoretical. It's the ban list we maintain inside Pounce's own writing prompts, built one pattern at a time as we caught each one slipping into drafts:
The negate-then-assert reframe
"It's not a productivity trick, it's a mindset shift." The single most recognizable AI sentence pattern, in every word order: "X isn't just Y, it's Z", a trailing "..., not just Z", the terse "X isn't Y." One of these per week might pass. Models produce one per paragraph.
Mirrored sentences for rhythm
"One builds a business. The other builds a graveyard of good ideas." Two short clauses with identical structure, stacked for sing-song effect. A human reaches for this once in a while, deliberately. In model output it shows up every few paragraphs, and the sing-song gives it away.
Everything comes in threes
"The problems with A are B, C, and D." Models are addicted to the rule of three. Ask one for the problems with anything and you'll get exactly three, each about the same length, in nearly every sentence that enumerates. One vivid example beats three balanced ones, but a model pads to the triad every time.
The announced insight
"That's the real unlock." "This is the real story here." Framing that points at its own cleverness instead of just making the point. If a sentence has to declare that it's insightful, it usually isn't.
The invented crowd
"Most people optimize for reach. The ones who win optimize for trust." Who are these people? A faceless majority gets conjured so the writer can look contrarian against it. Real writers argue with real positions.
The missing "I"
Ask a person about a movie and they say "I watched it yesterday and loved it." A model says "That movie was great." AI defaults to detached, third-person pronouncements because it has no experiences to draw on. Whole paragraphs without a single "I" or "me", no first-person specifics anywhere, read as someone with nothing personal to say. Which is exactly what a model is.
Filler vocabulary and throat-clearing
Delve, leverage, robust, seamless, crucial, pivotal, holistic. "It's important to note that", "when it comes to", "at the end of the day". Each word exists to sound thorough while saying nothing. The plain version is always available: "use" instead of "leverage", "solid" instead of "robust". Or cut the sentence entirely.
Metronome rhythm
Every sentence lands between 18 and 24 words, paragraph after paragraph, with an em dash bolted into half of them. It's the tell that survives every word swap, because it lives in the cadence, which no vocabulary fix touches. Read a suspect paragraph aloud and you'll hear it.
Any one of these can be coincidence. Three in a paragraph, and readers have already decided.
What sounding like AI actually costs you
The mild version is that people stop reading. Regulars in any community skim past prose that smells generated, the same way they skim past ads. Your genuinely good point, wrapped in bot cadence, gets the engagement of a bot.
The harsher version is that readers can't tell you apart from spam, and they've stopped trying. A person who drafts with AI and edits carefully, and a bot network flooding a thread with generated comments, produce surfaces that look identical. Nobody investigates before muting. On Reddit, moderators remove posts on style tells alone, like transitional filler with no first-person specifics anywhere. Whole subreddits ban AI-generated content outright, and r/programming went as far as banning LLM-written posts across the board. Your account eats the ban either way.
And on X, the pattern that AI slop naturally produces, high volume plus low specificity, is exactly what the platform's spam and manipulation rules target. Enough reports on empty-sounding replies and the suspension is automatic, no human ever weighing whether there was a person behind them.
And intent won't save you. Once a community decides you're a bot, there's no appeals process. The reputation loss arrives instantly and repairs slowly, if at all.
How to keep your voice while writing with AI
The fix is a short editing pass, four steps that strip the machine out of a draft and leave you in it:
Hunt the patterns before the words
Swapping "delve" for "dig into" changes nothing if the sentence still reframes with "it's not X, it's Y". Hunt the patterns: the negation reframe, the mirrored clauses, the tidy triads, the announced insight. When you find one, rewrite it as a plain statement of what you mean. The plain version is almost always stronger.
Cut filler until it hurts
Delete every "it's important to note", every "when it comes to", every hedge you don't actually feel. If you know the answer, say it plainly. If you don't, leave it out. When in doubt, cut words rather than add them.
Break the rhythm
Read it aloud. If every sentence takes the same breath, split one in half and let another run long. Human writing is uneven because thinking is uneven. One three-word sentence does more to humanize a paragraph than any vocabulary swap.
Add the thing only you know
First person, one concrete detail: the bug that ate your whole Saturday, or the real number from your own dashboard. Models can't invent your specifics, which is exactly why one real detail instantly reads as human. Never let AI invent them for you; a made-up stat is worse than no stat.
A specific, slightly rough line beats a smooth one that says nothing.
You shouldn't have to fight your tools
Everything above is an editing pass you can run by hand, and you should, on anything that matters. But if you're replying at volume to grow an audience, hand-scrubbing 30 drafts a day for bot cadence stops being realistic.
So we run this pass for you. Every Pounce draft is generated with the catalog above banned outright, the reframe patterns, mirrored cadence, filler vocabulary, and announced insights, and with your actual sent replies as the voice reference, so drafts start from how you already write.
And when a draft still isn't you, the Fix button lets you say why in one note ("too formal", "I'd never open like that") and Pounce redoes it, optionally learning the correction for every reply after.