While Artificial Intelligence can be impressively fluent, it often leaves a few fingerprints (my colleague Tom Slade tells me).
Here are a few clues you may be dealing with a bot rather than a real (breathing) human:
- Too polished and uniform: Everything is evenly paced, neatly paragraphed, and consistently “professional,” with little natural variation.
- Vague but confident: Strong claims delivered smoothly, but light on concrete details—names, dates, numbers, or specific examples.
- Repetition disguised as development: The same point is restated several times in slightly different wording to fill space.
- Formatting and punctuation artifacts: Overuse of long dashes (—), heavy bulleting, and random bolded phrases.
- Odd metadata footprints: Unusual author fields, such as “python,” suggest the entire document was generated online.
And here are a few tools you can use to check:
- Grammarly’s AI Checker
- GPTZero
- Or, ask an AI chatbot itself.
However, the real question is often not “was AI used?” but “was judgment used?”
Good writing still requires a human mind behind it. If you can tell AI wrote it, a bigger problem may be that no one truly edited it…