The structure of this sentence is a dead giveaway that AI wrote it

"For as long as people have been using AI to churn out text, other people have been coming up with "tells" that something was written by AI. Sometimes it's punctuation that comes under suspicion. (The em dash is generally considered the shadiest.) Other times it's words that robot writers seem to love and overuse. But what if the biggest giveaway that a text was written by AI isn't a word, phrase, or punctuation mark, but a particular sentence structure instead?"

"Why is it so hard to make AI writing sound human? The idea that certain rhythms of sentences might be a sign of AI writing first came to my attention through my work as a professional word nerd. Recently, I a potential new client contacted me about helping to polish up some of their writing. As an editor, that's not unusual. But like several recent inquiries, this assignment came with an AI-age twist."

Repetitive sentence rhythms and uniform structures can make text feel nonhuman even when vocabulary and punctuation appear natural. An editor evaluated a client's AI-synthesized summary that passed factual checks and had common AI tells removed, yet the prose still sounded robotic. The persistent problem pointed to deeper syntactic patterns rather than surface cues like em dashes or favored words. Entrepreneurs, marketers, and communicators confront similar challenges when using AI to speed workflows without producing off-note prose. Varying sentence length, introducing irregularities, and mimicking human syntactic variation can help make writing read as authentically human.

Read at Fast Company