Eric Spencer

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How to tell if written work is AI

Easily tell if something is AI using these obvious giveaways

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Generated READMEs and summaries are convenient; this page collects observations about their recurring tells.

False contrasts

This sentence structure turns up more and more often online. It was not noticeable until a couple of months ago, which suggests that more people are generating summaries with a model that favours it. It already gets old.

Others have noticed this too

Emojis

Asking ChatGPT to generate a markdown file with a list of topics is an easy way to prove this one. Each title usually arrives with an emoji next to it. Nobody would go out of their way to mark every topic in a list with a custom emoji, in a summary of opinions about B2B SaaS tools of the kind that shows up constantly on LinkedIn. The emojis on most such lists are pleasant enough. An emoji is a visual cue for the topic in peripheral vision, and it does that better than a word or two would. The only problem is finding the correct emoji for the topic.

The em dash

The em dash drew suspicion long before AI. Using one in a freshman-year high school English paper, about seven years ago, already carried the worry that the teacher would think a source had been copied off the internet. It was not taught in class, just picked up from reading articles online. Its status as a telltale sign of AI use today is no surprise at all.

That is a reason to be cautious with it now, and to use a stupid amount of parentheses instead for a side point inside a sentence (like right here).