Perhaps not 100% because I’ve just spent hours chatting with several LLMs, complaining about the spate of purported AI detectors that tell me ‘this content shows a high similarity to AI-generated content’ or somewhat.

If I weren’t already familiar with the AI tells, I am now, as Claude reluctantly shared this:

Lexical tics. The ones you’ve already flagged are real: “delve,” “robust,” “nuanced,” “multifaceted,” “landscape” (used metaphorically for any domain whatsoever), “tapestry,” “leverage” (as verb), “facilitate,” “underscores.” There’s also a tier of slightly subtler ones — “notably,” “crucially,” “it’s worth noting that,” “this is particularly important because” — which function as false-emphasis markers, lending rhetorical weight where the content doesn’t actually earn it.

Structural patterns. This is where it gets more diagnostic than any single word choice. LLM prose tends toward a very particular architecture: a thesis-restating opening sentence, three to five parallel elaboration points (often with suspiciously balanced treatment), and a synthesising conclusion that circles back to the opening. The ratio of setup-to-substance is high. Everything gets contextualised before it gets said. There’s a compulsive both-sides-ism, a hedging reflex — “while X is certainly true, it’s also important to consider Y” — that reads less like genuine intellectual caution and more like a conflict-avoidance subroutine.

Tonal tells. LLM text tends to be relentlessly encouraging. There’s an affective flatness masquerading as warmth — everything is “great question,” everything “raises important considerations.” The prose never gets genuinely irritable, confused, bored, or reckless. It maintains a kind of supervisory friendliness, the register of a middle manager who’s been on a coaching course. Relatedly, there’s almost never a genuinely surprising analogy or a metaphor that risks falling flat — the figurative language is always safe, always legible, always serviceable.

Punctuation and rhythm. The em-dash point is real but often overstated. More telling is sentence-length uniformity — LLM prose tends to hover in a narrow band of 15–25 words per sentence, rarely producing either the genuinely terse or the genuinely complex-subordinated. Paragraph length is also strikingly regular. The prose breathes at metronomic intervals.

The absence of mess. Perhaps the deepest tell. Human writing — even polished human writing — contains asymmetries: a paragraph that runs long because the writer got interested, a point that gets dropped without resolution, a transition that’s slightly rough, a joke that doesn’t quite land but stays in anyway. LLM prose is clean in a way that signals not craft but indifference — nothing is there because the writer cared about it, so nothing is disproportionate.

Add to this grammar-checkers attempting to drive writing back to middle school formats – not to mention competing grammar checkers hypercorrecting each other. The struggle is real.

Of course, a solution might be just to review the content and undo these inclusions. Almost interestingly, I use Autocrit (but not often because it is too orthodox), but it does serve somewhat as an anti-AI agent, assessing rhythm and pace, plus the usual copyediting functions.

I prefer to draft in a stream-of-consciousness style. The AI organises my messes, so if I asked it to, it would remove or relocate my functional parenthetical about Autocrit. But I’m leaving it just to prove I’m human. Or did I add it to an AI-scripted piece? 🧐

Whilst I considered that I could either overdo AI or join the 54 per cent of Americans who write at a third-grade level. Grok suggested something even more sinister – Friggin Musk. It suggested that I double down on the AI likeness and make my content into an AI parody factory – overpopulate it with em-dashes, deving, and tapestry. Evidently, Carole King was AI before Suno.

In any case – and AI might suggest moving this to the top – the problem is that I now have an additional layer that interrupts my flow and process. It’s disconcerting, and I resent it. My psyche is disturbed to appease witchhunters. And it’s bollox.

The question is whether to succumb to the moral suasion or ignore the moral posturing.

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