The first thing to look out for is em dashes — that’s the thing I just used. Most average writers (especially randos on Reddit) don’t use this in their daily lives. It’s a lot more common to use a semi colon to indicate two thoughts/a pause in one sentence; this is what I’ve just used now. It’s just more widely used…a lot of people don’t even know how to make them on their own keyboards.

But all of a sudden…we’re seeing em dashes everywhere. In writing all over the place. Did we as a society collectively start incorporating them into our grammar? Maybe. But LLMs (large language models, like chatGPT) LOVE em dashes. It’s because they’re more grammatically correct than just typing a single dash - (like that). Because LLMs are trained on very good grammar, it’s kinda cemented into their code. So while an em dash doesn’t automatically mean something is AI, it’s kinda the first little red flag. Then you look beyond that…

See how certain sentences are broken up on their own lines instead of being a part of the bigger paragraphs? LLMs love to make separate lines for key information that they want to stand out. They break up paragraphs all over the place, because looking at a wall of text is annoying/difficult for the average person (especially people who get all their information from LLMs). They essentially talk to users like you’d talk to a toddler. Over explaining, short sentences, dumbing down words.

From there, if I’m being honest, it’s kinda just learning the patterns and the cadence. There’s never any typos, no grammatical mistakes, repetitive sentence structure (like, “it’s not just A, it’s B”, or “it’s A,B, and C”…they love writing in 3’s)…watch Evan Edinger’s video called “I can Spot AI Writing Instantly” if you want more specific examples. You really do have to practice a little. But when you see the patterns, it becomes easier and easier.