How to Tell Whether Content Was Written by AI

“AI Slop” is mediocre AI-generated content posted to social media such as X, Facebook, YouTube, etc., for the sole purpose of getting views and monetization. In fact, YouTube is experiencing an AI crisis. Some of the fastest-growing channels post AI content.
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.
• AI doesn’t follow the usual essay structure. Instead it tends to repeat the same point.
• You can swap sections or delete paragraphs without changing much.
• 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 Games

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, it attempts to engage the reader by suggesting how they should feel. It may seem manipulative.
It 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 little personality or regional voice, and it rarely includes personal anecdotes.

Common Formatting Tells

• AI writing usually has no typos or grammatical errors.
• Overuse of em dashes —
• “Quotation marks” for emphasis, especially curly quotes.
• Repeated sentence structures across paragraphs and sections.
• Repeated information across sections.

Accuracy

AI can “hallucinate” facts. Always check sources. References may sound right but not actually exist.
This article is from The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI):

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.
AI on Trial: Legal Models Hallucinate in 1 out of 6 (or More) Benchmarking Queries

In Summary

AI seems like a shortcut to getting articles written in a hurry. But AI doesn’t usually add new ideas. Instead, it repeats and reinforces the same point.
Its strength is gathering and smoothing 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 tool, not a replacement for human writing.

Resources

There are tools that can help identify AI articles, but none are perfect. Don’t rely on just one. Use a few and compare. The following tools have free options.

• GPTZero is the most accurate commercial AI detector according to latest benchmarks.
• QuillBot AI content detector is trained to detect content generated by GPT-5, Gemini, Claude, Llama, and more. A Chrome plugin is available.
• Grammerly AI checker, trained to identify AI-generated text.