It’s become horribly easy to spot AI writing. The false tension. The emojis and em-dashes.
A partial solution is to teach your favorite AI tool not to write like that. I have a Claude .md file that instructs it to avoid negative parallelisms, bold-first bullets, filler transitions, and too many em-dashes. This way, if my Claude were giving advice on a chicken recipe, it would never say things like:
Not a stew. Not a soup. A braise.
Three hours. One pot. No shortcuts.
This isn’t dinner — it’s an argument about how you spend a Sunday. Everything from the sear to the silence at the table is part of the same tapestry.
The lid goes on.
And then you wait.
While this is all humorous, it’s everywhere, and our tolerance for it speaks volumes.
The old tells for “I didn’t care enough to do a good job on this” were typos, unfinished sentences and numbers that didn’t add up.
Now, everything that’s error-free but screams AI sends the message: “I phoned this in, so don’t trust me.”
The way you avoid this is by actually doing the work: rereading each word, thinking about it, acknowledging that “I sent this” means “these words faithfully represent me and my best thinking.”
There’s no problem using the tools to help you, but you have to practice EWIMO writing, always.
Every word is my own.
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