this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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Fuck AI

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TL;DR for AI writing warning signs:

  • Use of the em-dash (—)
  • Parallel sentence structure (e.g. "It's not just X, it's Y")
  • Grouping things in threes or at least odd numbers
  • Delineating line breaks with emojis
  • Odd/unnatural verbiage
  • Overuse of filler words (talking like your average LinkedIn post)
  • Exaggerated and empty praise
  • Weird analogies and similes
  • Restating and overclarifying points

TL;DR for signs something was written by a human:

  • Including anecdotes
  • Written in the first person
  • Tangents and nonlinear storytelling
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[–] kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)
  • Including anecdotes
  • Written in the first person
  • Tangents and nonlinear storytelling

Weird that AI can't handle talking in the first person. Why just the other day I, a human, was saying to my sister, who is also human, about how strange AI is. See, she was grew up in another home with her mother where they didnt use as much technology. We shared a father who fought in Desert Storm. His favorite color was blue, like the kind you see in very thick ice. See most people think ice is just clear, but that is only becuase you need a lot of ice to properly refract light into its true blue color. Refraction works because colors come from different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, and those wavelengths bend at different angles when refracted by passing through transparent materials.... what was I saying? Oh yeah, AI is strange.

[–] brianary@lemmy.zip 11 points 11 hours ago (3 children)

I'm not going to stop using em dashes. Find a different indicator!

[–] albbi@piefed.ca 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Semicolons are also an indicator. Who the hell uses those?

[–] Yaky@slrpnk.net 1 points 3 hours ago

I use it occasionally, when writing lists with lots of detail, or to separate parts of the sentence where I already used multiple commas.

there are many thought-provoking ideas about conscience, the human brain, and alien life; yet it is wrapped in a mediocre sci-fi action movie script

[–] Robust_Mirror@aussie.zone 1 points 10 hours ago

It's one piece. You tell me I want to spot cars one thing they have is wheels, I'm not going to immediately assume every bike I see is a car. But taken with other signs it builds a pattern.

Honestly I've found the best way to spot LLM is just use it an absolute crap ton. You'll start to be able to spot it the way you can recognise the style of an author or director.

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 3 points 10 hours ago

Weird analogies and similes

Well, guess I'm half AI or, to put it another way, I'm similar to a machine that's being frequently affected by cosmic rays when doing calculations

[–] T156@lemmy.world 2 points 13 hours ago

Although I wonder how long these signs would be that effective for, since they seem really model-specific.

[–] danielquinn@lemmy.ca 27 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Please don't give this any credit. Nonsense like this is already being used to filter web form submissions for things like job applications.

Source: I applied for a role at a medium-sized company a couple weeks ago and was auto-rejected because my cover letter appeared to be AI-generated. I clicked "back", removed an em-dash, and the form was accepted.

[–] SL3wvmnas@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 10 hours ago

Yeah, having the same problem, but with social media. I've been using em dashes since the nineties, when I found out a pretty dash is just option-dash on my Mac. Switched almost to full time Linux now, still using em dashes. I tried using only minus signs for a time, but muscle memory is hard to beat.

[–] Bwaz@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago

Repeating the same content with different wording later in the text. For instance: saying the same statement you did earlier a little differently

[–] pixelkitty@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Welp, TIL that I’m a LLM. I frequently use at like 75% of those in my creative writing. I learned to use all of these by reading books.

[–] Signtist@lemmynsfw.com 8 points 1 day ago

That's the issue - so did AI. Real people use them less often because real people often don't read a lot of books. AI might not really understand the words it's spewing out, but it's at least good at formatting them as it's been shown.

[–] VitoRobles@lemmy.today 4 points 1 day ago

The summary isnt hitting the nuance.

I see a lot of AI garbage.

You get emojis as list elements. You see a lot of dry writing, like you're reading a blog. You get vague nothings that sound good, but are meaningless.

[–] BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

TIL that following many decades of carefully observed writing best practices makes you an AI.

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)
  • Including anecdotes
  • Written in the first person
  • Tangents and nonlinear storytelling

It's like they read a Vonnegut book and said, "That right there is peak human!" And I'd agree!

[–] phneutral@feddit.org 32 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Fuck — as an designer and typography nerd I just love them em-dashes.

[–] athairmor@lemmy.world 2 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

It’s “em dash” and there shouldn’t be spaces around it. FYI.

[–] phneutral@feddit.org 3 points 4 hours ago

I‘m German … in German we connect words with small dashes and put spaces around the larger ones … it’s the habit :)

[–] GreatBlueHeron@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm sure I've used some software that's auto corrected hyphens to em-dashes too, but I can't remember what.

[–] Jax@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago

Outlook does

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[–] Balerion6@lemmy.world 78 points 1 day ago (8 children)

As a writer myself, I find this rather depressing. I use parallel sentence structure, group things in threes, use unusual-but-accurate words, and come up with my own metaphors because those are good ways to make your point. I'm also inclined to restate and overclarify things to minimize the chance of being misunderstood. I hate the idea of my writing being mistaken for AI slop. At least I type my em-dashes as --, which LLMs don't do.

[–] Randomgal@lemmy.ca 55 points 1 day ago

This is the issue. It's not that this is "LLM writing style". It is just formal writing. The thing is most people write like third graders, so these stick out with good reason, just not that 'it is AI'.

In general there aren't good ways to tell TBH. Literally giving it the command to 'not write like an AI' would make half of these disappear.

Having the AI edit a text for you would add some of these. Not because it is AI, but because that's proper writing.

[–] caseyweederman@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago

You can take em—dash out of my cold dead hands

[–] TheAgeOfSuperboredom@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 day ago

I don't think it's necessarily just a checklist of things, but rather the way an LLM's output resembles these techniques that puts it into an uncanny valley of writing. As a writer, you use these techniques deliberately and thoughtfully. LLMs can't do that, so the output just feels off.

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago

where do you think they learned it?

[–] youngalfred@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 day ago

Maybe you're actually a llm? And you're slowly learning to disguise that you are by using --

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[–] GreatBlueHeron@lemmy.ca 20 points 1 day ago (4 children)

For me the most obvious tell is using 16 paragraphs to say something that could have been said with 16 words.

[–] BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

You just described the last two decades of cooking/recipe websites.

Dr. Ian Malcom: “SEO ruins succinct writing, AI trains on bloated SEO ‘optimized’ text, AI produces bloated SEO-optimized output…”

[–] Manticore@lemmy.nz 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I have ADHD and like en and em dashes. I've been known to use emoji points to make my 16 paragraphs easier to read.

Fortunately I think the constant personal tangents arr saving me

[–] GreatBlueHeron@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago

I get what you're saying, but I'll just clarify that my 16 paragraphs vs 16 words was about wordiness, not layout.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

That's because you're probably not used to people from STEM areas who tend to be thorough rather than risk that some things might be mis- or not at all understood: the less one is sure about the level of knowledge or ability to keep up of those on the other side, the more thorough the explanation becomes.

Also the deeper you think about something the more elements there are to explain.

[–] GreatBlueHeron@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago

I have a STEM background myself and spent a good bit of my career writing (relatively poorly in my opinion) technical documentation. I understand what you're saying and I guess I didn't make my point very well.

I was hoping people would understand that I was referring to the enshitification of internet search results - where every search leads to pages of results of entire articles about very simple topics that say basically nothing. It seems obvious to be, though I admit I'm making an assumption, that the vast majority of these articles are LLM generated fluff attempting to lure people to pages to generate ad revenue.

[–] VitoRobles@lemmy.today 2 points 1 day ago

I find that a more human trait with writing.

People go on and on about nothing and have broken sentence fragments. AI tends to be "too clean".

[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 23 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] bhamlin@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago

It's not just true, it's a fact — we are all of us llms.

[–] MrMcGasion@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

Thought I might be one too, until the "tangents and nonlinear storytelling" as evidence of being human and the scene from Megamind where he goes "being bad is the one thing I'm good at" came to mind.

[–] Mothra@mander.xyz 26 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I thought it would be the semicolon, judging from the thumbnail. Now that would piss me off; I love semicolons, it would be unfair if they become the hallmark of LLMs.

I also appreciate the long dash but on mobile keyboard it's so awkward to find that nobody uses it for comments anymore.

[–] Balerion6@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago

Personally, I use the em-dash a lot, but I just type it as --.

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[–] Darkore@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 day ago

meanwhile here i am with the silly three-em dash⸻too long to be used in most cases, so it's rarely used when training ai⸻and the two-em dash⸺not quite as absurd, but still pretty rare⸺and i keep on looking for weird characters to use regularly

[–] SunshineJogger@feddit.org 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

This stuff can also pip up if AI was merely used to spellcheck.

This list would be wrong way too often dude

[–] VitoRobles@lemmy.today 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Not really. Spell check would only correct typos and grammar. It's still your style, your thoughts, your expression with the language.

If you're putting your whole essay into a AI tool, yeah... It's going to turn it into garbage with the list above. And that's on you.

[–] SunshineJogger@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago

AI is stupid and often does more than told, even if the text is short.

And replacing the hyphen would not be replaced

[–] Michal@programming.dev 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Good luck, the next rounds of training will iron these out and the line will continue blurring. These tips will flag a lot of false positives from educated people, and those comments are valuable. Maybe if you look for human-style mistakes you will have hope determining if comment was made by a human, like capitalisation, autocomplete issues, and typos.

It's much easier spotting AI in photos, videos and probably audio.

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[–] metaStatic@kbin.earth 12 points 1 day ago (6 children)

literally any tell will be fed back into the models to make them harder to detect, I wouldn't be surprised if this is already being automated

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[–] CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

So just add this to your prompt to not do these things? None of the items listed can’t already be handled by existing LLMs.

[–] funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

I have done this with work stuff. Doesn't always work.

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