The nine tells that make AI text obvious
Our published taxonomy sorts the habits that give a draft away into nine categories. Six of them are removals, which is the useful part: most of what marks a draft can simply be deleted.
A draft written by a model rarely fails on facts. It fails on register. The sentences are grammatical, evenly weighted, and hedged in the same places, and after two paragraphs a reader who edits for a living can name the source without being told. That pattern is what this taxonomy sets out to name.
Six of the nine categories are deletions: stock openers, hedges, filler phrases, padding, over-signposting and the listicle reflex. Nothing has to be rewritten to fix them. The sentence that remains is the sentence the writer meant, one clause shorter.
In today's fast-paced world, it is important to note that a stock opener is the cheapest tell to remove.
Three categories do change meaning: vague claims, clichés and repeated shapes. These are the ones we never apply silently. A vague claim is replaced with something specific, and something specific can be wrong, so the edit arrives with the phrase it replaced sitting next to it.
A tool that rewrites your argument without showing you is not an editor. It is a second author you did not hire.
The nine categories
What the score is not
The human score is a reading of register against this list. It is not a detector, it does not identify a model, and it cannot tell you whether a passage will be flagged somewhere else. Text a person wrote in stock business phrasing scores badly, and that is the correct result: the phrasing is the problem either way.
The practical version of all this is short. Cut the opener. Cut the hedge. Replace one vague benefit with a number you can defend. Most drafts improve more from those three moves than from another round of prompting.
Sources
- The nine categories, with definitionsGenPolish ·