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Start here Your customers can’t hear the tune in your head Tap a song on a table and almost nobody can name it. Your readers have the same problem with your content. Here’s why it happens and how to fix it. Stand out5 min
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Our advice 8

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Blog Attract 5 min read

How to tell if your writing sounds like AI

Lewis Dowling Managing Director and Consultant

Readers trust content less when they think AI wrote it. Here are the four tics that give AI writing away and why they point to fuzzy thinking.

Contents

People have a kneejerk reaction to AI content. They don’t like it. In 2025, a Raptive survey found that trust dropped by almost 50% when readers thought AI wrote the piece. Even if it was actually a human. It also caught the ads next to them in the crossfire, with readers finding those ads 11% less trustworthy.

That’s obviously not great for your brand. But there’s a deeper problem, too. There’s clearly a style – a cadence – that AI writing follows. You don’t know why. It just falls into that uncanny valley of feeling not quite human.

It’s almost so polished that it sounds… robotic.

And is that how you really want your brand to come across?

Your brand will get lost in the noise

When everyone uses AI to write their ad campaigns and content, it all ends up sounding the same. It strips away the personality from your brand. Everything that makes your business unique gets sterilised to the point of blandness.

The fact that people can notice AI writing just proves that it must all sound the same. Even if the models get better and the exact writing traits change, people will just cotton onto the new style.

The main problem is that there’s no real personality behind the words. It creates paragraphs without any real thought about how the whole piece hangs together. If you spend just a moment thinking about what it really means, you realise it’s empty. Meaningless. And that’s what people notice.

When you learn to spot those signs, it confronts you with the fact that you’ve not thought about what you’re trying to say hard enough. It reveals the cracks in your thinking.

Spot the telltale signs of AI

While it’s useful to know specific phrases and tics that AI uses, those traits will inevitably change as the models improve. Today, we see that AI writing tends to do four specific tics:

1. Choosing odd words.

AI will latch onto certain words or phrases and repeat them in almost everything it writes. These change between models – and we suspect it’s partly due to behind-the-scenes prompts and context it gets. For example, it’ll be told “don’t leave an escape hatch” so ‘escape hatch’ worms its way into its responses.

This is particularly obvious when it comes to descriptive words. It loves to add adjectives or adverbs where a human wouldn’t bother. For example “quietly.” A real person wouldn’t say that their business was ‘quietly reshaping’ their industry. It sounds odd.

2. Using specific sentence structures.

Similarly, AI will find certain sentence structures and use them over and over again. Most of these are cliches that we’ve all seen a million times.

This is particularly prominent when it switches from one point to another. It’ll use generic phrases to segue between the paragraphs. Things like “In today’s fast-paced world” or “It’s a testament to the power…”

3. Focusing on basic rhetoric.

AI seems to think that rhetorical tricks and techniques should be used in every single paragraph. It’ll use repetition, the rule of three, antithesis, and rhetorical questions in almost anything you ask it to write. It relies on these – and only these – to make its writing sound professional and inspiring.

The most obvious of these is where it flips a negative into a positive, like “It’s not just about X, it’s about Y.” (This is called antithesis.)

But interestingly, it rarely uses less obvious rhetorical techniques. For example, it’ll hardly use alliteration, hyperbole, or irony. They seem beyond the reach of current models.

4. Grasping at unnatural measurements.

Perhaps in an attempt to be more specific and accurate, AI will quite often use overly specific timings like “take this six-minute quiz” or it was a “three-month delay.” A real human would tend to round or gloss over these details. We’d say “about five” or “a few” instead.

This crops up in other measurements, too. It doesn’t understand the difference between two friends telling each other it’s hot outside and a weather reporter giving the exact degrees. So it errs on the side of accuracy, even though it’s unnatural and irrelevant.

The biggest sign, however, is larger than specific word choices and phrases. It’s the structure and flow of the piece. There’s a cadence to the flow that feels stilted and unnatural. It’s too choppy. It doesn’t vary between long sentences and short ones, giving a rhythm to the piece.

And the ideas don’t gel together. It’ll bundle together points or repeat them in slightly varied language. Everything feels vague, while using language that sounds accurate.

These aren’t all necessarily bad traits

Professional writers will use odd language in an attempt to grab your attention. They’ll use the occasional cliche. They’ll use rhetoric.

But they do it sparingly. They do it with purpose. With restraint.

And – most tellingly of all – a good writer will break the rules completely when the moment calls for it. They’ll end on a preposition. They’ll boldly split the infinitive. And they’ll start on a conjunction. (Mainly because those rules are all a load of codswallop anyway.)

An AI doesn’t have that intuition.

Spot the AI in your writing

Using AI to refine your writing isn’t bad. It can be a useful tool to clean up your thinking. But it still needs editing.

So we’ve made a free AI skill – Ava-spotter – that you can use to check what you create. You’ll get a report highlighting the sentences and general themes that make the piece sound like AI. It’s not a way to check if a piece of writing is definitely AI, but whether it’s got any of the traits that break that trust with your reader. Give it a whirl.

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