AI can be overly wordy in most of its outputs. At work it's painfully obvious when someone phones it in - when you observe their typical style of terse, short and direct sentences suddenly replaced with bloated 5 paragraph musings complete with weird (often incorrect) punctuation, random bolded words, and bizarre wording, you know it's AI. This isn't rocket science.
How to Spot AI Writing
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Re: How to Spot AI Writing
#72One way to tell is if the tone is hostile, cynical, or otherwise not full of that giddy optimistic tone associated with what I’ll call “California Business English.” The mainstream AI companies are loathe to output anything too controversial, so if someone is writing like Burroughs (in content, not merely style) they are less likely to be AI. That is possible to bypass with local models, but the vast majority of writ…
"We love founder Joe and his passion infuses our workplace. We are pleased to announce founder Joe is now pursuing his own interests and his passion of spending more time with his loved ones."
I can't even do justice to useless HR speak.
Re: How to Spot AI Writing
#73AI can be overly wordy in most of its outputs. At work it's painfully obvious when someone phones it in - when you observe their typical style of terse, short and direct sentences suddenly replaced with bloated 5 paragraph musings complete with weird (often incorrect) punctuation, random bolded words, and bizarre wording, you know it's AI. This isn't rocket science.
The excessive emojis and heavy formatting really bugs me. Microsoft copilot loves this style.
Re: How to Spot AI Writing
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For example, I recently spent 2 weeks researching Bruce Lee ... [AI] output will just be a reiteration of already common knowledge instead of the actual efforts I made researching all of it. Presumably you researched Bruce Lee by reading and consuming other media related to him, most of which is likely known by the AI models. They just don't have access to any novel idea that you generated, inspired by your researc…
> Presumably you researched Bruce Lee by reading and consuming other media related to him, most of which is likely known by the AI models. They just don't have access to any novel idea that you generated, inspired by your research. Yes, assuming they trained on all written works and all his movies, yes. But again, I found several times where AI is just plain wrong about actual facts and it'll reconsider if you provid…
1) the hallucination problem is known, and thus in the middle of the crosshairs of half the AI researchers in existence
2) you're assuming you know all Bruce Lee facts, which is the only way you'll distinguish true from false, and the only way you'll be able to correctly identify hallucinations. This is obviously not the case. AI models will get to this point. You won't.
The point will come, and for any reasonable person has long since passed, that any AI knows so many Bruce Lee facts they know 10x more of them than any individual does. And they can just keep writing articles leaving out different subsets of those facts and you will never know
3) everyone actually involved in writing these articles, including writers, publishers, advertisers, ... all have their incentives pointing the same way: towards deceiving you about this, and even towards not caring about it when they get caught.
Re: How to Spot AI Writing
#75https://archive.ph/i9UQP
Haha! Very wise. Never knew this was possible. Thanks for this.
Does the same thing happen with WSJ?
Re: How to Spot AI Writing
#76Quote “So if you want to spot ai writing, look for bland, pretentious prose lavished with Latinate words—at least for now. With every update, our study shows, ai writing is becoming more similar to human prose.”
So AI makes you sound like modern political weasel wordsmithing.
Re: How to Spot AI Writing
#77I hate the em and en dash claims — some of us know how to use them!
Most people don't know how to use them and of those who do many choose not to use them, at least not casually. The em dash is a lost battle, it's one of the first red flags for AI writing online.
A lot of word processors generate them automatically though.
Re: How to Spot AI Writing
#7830 Jul 2026 16:44:26 UTC
How to Spot AI Writing
https://economist.com/culture/2026/07/30/how-to-spot-ai-writ...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49112469
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31 Jul 2026 16:33:16 UTC
How to Spot AI Writing
https://www.economist.com/culture/2026/07/30/how-to-spot-ai-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49125334
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Re: How to Spot AI Writing
#79The best resource i’ve seen on this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
Take a look also at https://tropes.fyi/
I've put in some effort to try to help agentic tools avoid these problems: https://www.joshka.net/practice/rules/documentation/docs-avo....