12 Signs of AI Writing in 2026 (With Real Examples)

By the AIScorely team · Updated July 21, 2026 · 8 min read

I've read thousands of AI-generated articles at this point. After a while you stop needing a detector for the obvious ones; the text has a smell. This post is my attempt to write that smell down. These are the twelve tells our free AI detector actually measures, roughly in order of how often they give the game away.

1. Em-dashes everywhere

The most famous tell, fairly or not. Humans use em-dashes too, but chatbots deploy them constantly — for emphasis, for asides, for drama — sometimes three in a sentence. One dash per few hundred words is normal. One per paragraph is a flag.

2. "It's not X, it's Y"

The negative parallelism. AI loves the dramatic reframe.

Humans write "but" to actually contrast two ideas. Chatbots use this template to make ordinary statements sound profound. Once you notice it, you'll see it in every LinkedIn post you scroll past.

3. The AI vocabulary

Certain words got so overused by chatbots that they're now radioactive: delve, tapestry, pivotal, seamless, testament, landscape, foster, crucial, leverage, robust, realm, elevate, unlock, harness, holistic, myriad. None of these is wrong on its own. A paragraph containing four of them was probably not typed by fingers.

4. Flat sentence rhythm

This one is subtle and hard to fake your way out of. Human writing is bursty. Short sentence. Then a long, winding one that picks up a side thought, wanders a little, and lands somewhere slightly unexpected. Chatbots keep every sentence between roughly 15 and 25 words, and the sameness becomes hypnotic. Detectors call the measurement "burstiness," and low burstiness is one of the strongest signals there is.

5. Rule of threes

Triplets are a legitimate rhetorical device. AI uses them for everything: adjectives, benefits, takeaways, section structures. Two triads in one sentence, like above, is basically a signature.

6. Formulaic transitions

Moreover. Furthermore. Additionally. In conclusion. Real people almost never start sentences this way outside of school essays, which is exactly the register chatbots learned from. "Overall," as a paragraph opener is a quiet cousin of the same habit.

7. Significance inflation

AI can't resist telling you why a fact matters: "...highlighting the region's rich cultural heritage," "...underscoring the importance of collaboration," "...a testament to human ingenuity." A plain fact gets a little inspirational tail. Cut the tail and the sentence usually improves instantly.

8. Bold-bullet lists

The bolded term followed by a colon and a sentence that just reuses the term. ChatGPT's default output structure, and almost nobody writes this way by hand.

9. Perfect grammar, zero personality

No typos, no fragments, no contractions, no opinions, no "honestly" or "look" or a joke that doesn't quite land. Competence without a pulse. Ironically, an occasional imperfection is now one of the most convincing signs a human was involved.

10. Chatbot leftovers

The dead giveaways: "I hope this helps!", "Certainly! Here's a breakdown", "As an AI language model", "Let me know if you'd like me to expand." These survive when someone pastes output without reading it. Our detector treats even one of these as close to conclusive.

11. The compulsive summary

AI restates what it just told you, as though you can't hold a thought for three paragraphs. If an 800-word post ends with "In conclusion" plus a recap of its own headings, a robot probably built it.

12. Confident vagueness

Lots of "various factors," "a wide range of benefits," "numerous studies show" — with no factor, benefit, or study ever named. Humans who know a topic get specific because specifics are the fun part. AI stays vague because vague is always safe.

So what do you do with this list?

Two things. If you're checking someone else's work, look for clusters — any single tell means little, four together mean a lot. If you're checking your own AI-assisted drafts, treat the list as an editing checklist, or save yourself the manual work: our free checker highlights every one of these patterns directly in your text, and our guide on humanizing AI content shows how to fix them without rewriting from scratch.