AI · Field Notes
The Words That Give AI Away
There's still a tell - for now. The words are the easy layer; the harder one is a paragraph that sounds like nobody. And mostly, I catch it in my own writing.
There's still a tell. For now.
You learn to feel it before you can name it. A paragraph slides past and something's off - too smooth, too balanced, too eager to wrap up. Then you spot the words. Delve. The big one - nobody had delved into anything in casual writing for a century, and then overnight everyone's AI was delving. And the ChatGPT tics: crucial, instrumental, the tidy little word soup that says a lot of nothing - "it's important to note," "a testament to," "navigating the landscape."
Here's the honest part. I don't mostly catch these in other people's writing. I catch them in mine. I run a lot of words through a model, and the slop comes back stuck to the useful stuff, and if I'm not paying attention it goes out under my name. This very blog gets cleaned constantly. Earlier today I cut the word shape out of four different posts - "the shape of the thing," "the whole shape of it" - because once you see it you can't unsee it. In Norwegian I was pulling out kløkt and other words a real person would never reach for.
I don't mostly catch these in other people's writing. I catch them in mine.
So the tells are a real detector, right now. A reliable one. But it's a fading skill, and I have mixed feelings about that. The words are the easy layer - "delve" is the obvious one - and the models are already learning to drop them. What's harder to launder out is everything under the vocabulary: the relentless evenness, the way every point gets its tidy counterpoint, the absence of a person who actually prefers one thing over another.
Which is the real lesson, and it isn't about word lists. If your writing reads like the default output of a model, the problem isn't that you used "delve." It's that you let the machine's voice stand in for yours. The edit that matters isn't find-and-replace. It's putting your own voice back in.
I keep a short list of words that mean I wasn't paying attention. Delve is on it. Crucial, instrumental. Shape. The list is the easy part. The hard part is noticing when a whole paragraph sounds like nobody.
