Was It Written by AI?

When an article sounds too good, suspect AI. Here are some things to watch out for.

Writing Style

• AI writes very even paragraphs with the same length and tone.
• It doesn’t follow the usual essay structure. Instead it tends to repeat the same point.
• You can swap sections or delete paragraphs without changing the meaning.
• AI tends to explain what something means too early instead of presenting evidence.
• AI rarely leaves things open-ended. The ending tries to wrap everything up neatly.

Repetition & Word Tricks

AI says the same thing in different ways by using synonyms like important, significant, and meaningful to hide repetition.
It uses drama for emphasis, like: “It wasn’t just X. It was Y.” or “No signs. No answers.”

Tone & Emotional Manipulation

• Instead of just telling what happened, AI suggests how you should feel. It may feel manipulative.
• AI often uses big words to sound “deep” but doesn’t really say anything new.
• The emotional tone stays flat the whole time.

Safe Language

AI avoids strong opinions by using non-committal phrases like “Some say…” and “Others suggest…”. It avoids ruffling feathers or being outright wrong.

Impersonal

AI writing has no typos or grammatical errors. It has little personality or regional voice, and it rarely includes personal anecdotes.

Common AI Formatting Tells

• Overuse of em dashes —
• “Quotation marks” for emphasis, especially “curly quotes”
• Repeated sentence structures across paragraphs
• Repeated information across sections

Accuracy

AI can “hallucinate” facts. Always check sources. References may sound right but not actually exist.

Large language models have a documented tendency to “hallucinate,” or make up false information. In one highly-publicized case, a New York lawyer faced sanctions for citing ChatGPT-invented fictional cases in a legal brief; many similar cases have since been reported. And our previous study of general-purpose chatbots found that they hallucinated between 58% and 82% of the time on legal queries, highlighting the risks of incorporating AI into legal practice.
– The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), “AI on Trial: Legal Models Hallucinate in 1 out of 6 (or More) Benchmarking Queries“

Summary

AI doesn’t usually add new ideas. Instead, it repeats and reinforces the same point.

AI’s strength is gathering information but its fatal weakness is depth and originality.

If an article looks too polished, trust your instincts. Use one of the tools below to check.

Is It Wrong To Use AI?

Not completely.

AI is useful for gathering facts from multiple sources and summarizing that information, but it often falls short when writing full articles.

In this writer’s opinion, AI is better as a research tool, not a replacement for human writing.

Resources

There are free tools that can help identify AI articles, but none are perfect.

• GPTZero GPTZero detects AI content from ChatGPT, GPT-5, Claude, Gemini, and checks writing quality to make every word worth reading.
• QuillBot AI Detector by QuillBot. Paste your text to check whether it was written by AI. Our AI detector is trained to detect content generated by GPT-5, Gemini, Claude, Llama, and more.
• Grammarly Grammarly. Navigate responsible AI use with our AI checker, trained to identify AI-generated text. A clear score shows how much of your work appears to be written with AI so you can submit it with peace of mind.