“No fluff.” Or, tell me you are being influenced by AI without telling me.
Image by Mohamed Nohassi.
AI writing style, have you noticed it? Because we’re well beyond the em dash now.
The many tells of AI writing:
It’s a mix of straight quotes and curly quotes, signalling that the tweaks and edits are coming from inside (and outside) the house.
It’s a ‘But honestly?’ or ‘And the real truth?’ or any other short and inflammatory question to challenge the previous statement. Add an ‘actually’ and you’re golden.
It’s short sentences. Two words. One.
It’s an odd analogy, plopped right into a sentence, like a wild monkey swinging for the trees and missing.
It’s lots of paragraphs, each consisting of one sentence, placed one after another, all trying to be deep and quotable.
It’s “No scripts. No fluff. Just honest conversation.” Or any other three-part assertion consisting of two negatives followed by a positive.
On their own, any one of these is a normal and unremarkable feature of human writing today. Put several of them together, and it’s drivel.
And that’s not even accounting for semantically empty content.
Here’s an example:
Before I used AI to help with writing, I spent hours crafting my own posts. Funny thing is — some of the words I picked up back then still apply now.
Certain words stick.
This over that. Thing and nothing. Words and words.
And what I’ve realised is: it was never about the words. It was about how those words actually connected other words together. That’s where the good words word.
No fluff. No filler. Just this word and that one.
Adjective. Word. Idea.
And honestly? AI or not — the slop stays the same.
✨ Because ideas that use words are ideas that have more words.
If you’re wording with AI for writing, pay attention to this, not just that. That’s where the word is.
For more like this, use more AI. Or don’t. You can say nothing either way.
Would you like a carousel version of this too?
You can do it, too. Simply replace ‘word’ with whatever topic and its synonyms you wish. Voila! A post to sound like any other. The LinkedIn algorithm will love it.
But wait, there’s more! Here’s a way around all of the nonsense.
Fortunately, thanks to the incessant flood of AI slop, it’s never been easier to sound authentic.
Here’s how (in one simple step):
Open up a page and start writing.
That’s it. That’s what will set you apart from the overwhelming majority of people out there trying to have a voice online.
And while you may pick up a few of those AI style tells (we’re only human, after all), it won’t matter much.
The rest is up to the algorithmic gods to decide if it’s worthy of reach. But even if we’re not so lucky, at the very least, you’ll remember you wrote it.
Anecdote: I sometimes use ChatGPT to help me write SEO titles and descriptions for my articles. It’s one of the places AI truly excels and saves me time. I find it ironic that, for this post, I’ve lightly used AI to generate the sample post above, but have manually created the SEO content. 🤷🏻♀️
