5 Signs Your Writing Sounds AI-Generated (And How to Fix Each One)

You've seen it — or maybe you've written it. That flat, over-formal text that technically covers the topic but feels like it was assembled rather than written. Here are the five most common patterns and, more importantly, how to fix them.

1. It Opens With a Broad Generalization¶

AI-generated introductions almost always start by zooming out to the macro before getting to the actual point. "In today's rapidly changing digital landscape..." "As artificial intelligence continues to evolve..." "The modern world presents many challenges..."

These openers say nothing specific about your topic. They exist because language models have learned that articles often begin this way — not because it's good writing.

Fix: Delete the first sentence and see if the paragraph reads better without it. It almost always does. Start with the most specific, interesting, or surprising thing you have to say.

2. Every Sentence Is the Same Length¶

Read your paragraph aloud. If you find yourself pausing at the same rhythm every time, your sentences are too uniform. AI text tends toward medium-length sentences throughout, which creates a monotonous reading experience.

Fix: Deliberately vary length. After a long complex sentence, write a short one. Just three or four words. Then expand again into something with more clauses, which gives the reader a sense of movement and pulls them forward through the paragraph.

3. It Uses Stock Transitions¶

If your text contains "furthermore," "moreover," "in conclusion," "it is important to note that," "it should be noted that," or "it is worth mentioning," those phrases are flags. They're not wrong, but they're also the exact words AI models reach for because they appear constantly in formal writing in the training data.

Fix: Replace them with something more direct: - "Furthermore" → "And" or "On top of that" - "Moreover" → Just start the next sentence — you don't always need a transition - "In conclusion" → "Overall" or "The main takeaway is" - "It is important to note that" → Delete it, then state what you were going to say

4. There Are No Contractions¶

Real humans writing in English use contractions. Not in every sentence, but regularly. "It's," "you'll," "we're," "doesn't" — these make writing sound like a person wrote it.

AI models asked to write formally often avoid them entirely, which is part of why formal AI text sounds like it was written by someone who learned English from legal documents.

Fix: Read through your text and manually add contractions wherever they fit naturally. "It is important to remember" → "It's worth remembering." "You will find that" → "You'll find that." This single pass often makes a significant difference.

5. Every Paragraph Makes the Same Type of Point¶

This one is subtler. In AI-generated content, every paragraph tends to follow the same structure: make a claim, support it with a general statement, restate the claim. Human writing varies this — some paragraphs ask questions, some tell a short story, some are just two sentences making a sharp point before moving on.

Fix: After running a humanization tool, read the output and deliberately introduce structural variety. Add a short paragraph. Ask a rhetorical question. Use a specific example rather than a general statement. Make one paragraph deliberately shorter than the others.

These fixes work whether you're editing manually or using a tool. A good AI humanizer addresses the first four automatically — sentence variety, stock phrase removal, contraction handling, and tonal register. The fifth one benefits from a human editorial eye after the tool has done its job.