There’s no denying it anymore, AI is deep rooted in our everyday lives and the more we read about its perils, the more we rely on it everyday. What started as a novelty has become a cornerstone of modern content creation. Agencies, brands, and even solo entrepreneurs rely on it more than ever. In fact, some companies have taken it to an extreme: laying off entire content teams while happily paying for an AI subscription instead.
As someone who started her career as a content writer and has reviewed AI content continuously for almost a year, I can confidently say this shift is real and it’s reshaping not just how content is made, but how it ‘feels’. Once you realize a piece is AI-generated, you can’t unsee it. As a writer or an avid reader, your interest drops instantly because the soul of the piece goes missing.
If you’ve ever read something and thought, “Why does this feel… off?”, you were likely reading AI-written content.
So, we thought, let’s compile some AI telltale signs to identify whether a piece of content is AI generated or not (without using another AI tool to help).
Sign #1 – Overly Polished, Yet Emotionally Flat Tone
AI is great at correctness, but not so great at connection.
You’ll often see:
- Perfect grammar and probably perfect vocabulary (often you might not even know the meaning of the words used but they read impressive)
- Clean structure
- Neutral tone
- Zero emotional nuance
The writing feels safe, too safe, without any errors. It doesn’t take risks, doesn’t challenge the reader, and rarely leaves a lasting impression.
Human writers inject personality and perspective. An AI article will feel “diplomatic”, as if it wants to play both sides, never really voicing an opinion.
Sign #2 – Repetitive Sentence Structures
AI defaults to familiar rhythms:
- “In addition…”
- “However…”
- “On the other hand…”
- “Overall…”
- “This means that…”
My personal favourite is when each blog article starts with, “In today’s age and time” and ends with “Final thoughts”. Patterns emerge quickly. After reviewing enough content, you start spotting these fingerprints immediately. AI is becoming so predictable that it’s getting tedious to read the content it generates.
Sign #3 – Information That Feels Generalized or Surface-Level
AI excels at giving the “big picture,” but struggles with:
- Lived experience
- Real-world language
- Niche insights
- Contextual depth
Sure you can give prompts to use data from a real case study to build a point but it would still read mechanical and not perspective-driven. AI-generated content often reads like a Wikipedia summary, informative, yet shallow. It covers everything but says nothing new.
If an article sounds like it could apply to any industry, any audience, at any time, chances are an AI wrote it.
Sign #4 – Unnecessary Wordiness
AI tends to over-explain, sometimes to a point that it stops making sense all together. It ends up adding random phrases like “With that being said…”, “It’s important to understand that…”, “This plays a crucial role in…”
You might feel that it’s making a very important point but read it properly and you will realize that the point was neither crucial or important.
Sign #5 – Mechanical Transitions Between Ideas
AI struggles with flow. It knows how to move from Point A to Point B, but not how to transition naturally. You may notice that most of the AI articles are either in points format or bullets but never really in a story format. It has all the right ideas but doesn’t know how to curate them in a way that it feels natural. Most of the articles have “template-like” section breaks, abruptly shifting from one topic to another.
However, when a human would write, we would probably try and correlate using phrases like, “As mentioned in point #2” or “as described above”.
Sign #6 – Too Neutral, Too Balanced
AI has a habit of presenting both sides of every argument, even when unnecessary. Instead of taking a stance, it stays diplomatic, kind of like playing both sides.
If I was writing about some outdated concept, I would probably write:
“This strategy is outdated and honestly a waste of time.”
AI will say:
“While this strategy can be useful in some contexts, it may also have limitations depending on your goals.”
If the content feels allergic to opinions, that’s a sign.
Sign #7 – Perfectly Structured Lists and Headings
AI loves lists and numbers. If you see an article with, Numbered lists, Bulleted lists, Clean headers, Symmetry, it’s definitely AI.
It writes like it’s trying to please an SEO tool. It’s amazing how it always gets H1, H2, and H3s right when I keep struggling to tell my team to use headings in the right places.
Sign #8 – Overuse of “Helpful” but Generic Advice
Read an AI article and you will feel that it gave too much advice, but mostly generic. It won’t really give you actual tips but will share something like “make sure your website is accessible on all screen sizes” without actually sharing how to do that (unless you ask it in the next prompt). For a marketing strategy, it would say, “make sure your ads are tailored to your audience”, without telling you how to make sure ads are tailored.
Sign #9 – A Strange Lack of Voice
The biggest giveaway? – There’s no voice.
AI content flows smoothly but leaves no emotional trace.
Humans reveal themselves in their writing, if you read something from me, you will instinctively know that I’m the author, I will have my own style – sarcastic yet factual. AI is neutral. And yes, you can give prompts to add some kind of voice but it still won’t feel natural, it would feel too much.
I’m tempted to end this article by saying, “In conclusion”, but AI has already taken that tagline so I will be creative and say – “My dear readers, don’t be fooled into thinking that AI knows it all”.
For those of us who write for a living, it’s hard not to feel a pang when you read mass-produced AI articles. Once you can detect them, something inside you switches off. The piece becomes a product, not a creation.
AI is here to stay. It’s powerful, convenient, and has changed content creation forever. But if you ask any writer (at least the ones who are not looking for shortcuts to create content), they’ll tell you the same thing:
You can always tell when a machine wrote something—and once you know, it becomes increasingly hard to care about it.