It’s astonishing, but just in the past few months many of my valued clients have sent me files of text – some of them short books with as many as 20,000 words – asking that I edit them. I read the document and then I write back: “Was this written by an artificial intelligence algorithm?” There are many of them competing for your business, including ChatGPT, Jasper.ai, Ryter, Copy AI, Writesonic, GrowthBar, Closercopy, Article Forge, ParagraphAI, and more.

“You can tell it’s AI writing?” they reply.

“Yes, after reading just a few paragraphs. There are many telltale signs.”

Here are just a few dead giveaways that signal low-quality, AI-generated text.

1. Generic information. A low level of specificity, like looking through a window that’s fogged.
2. Repetition. The algorithm acts like a bad ghostwriter who needs to crank out the words to fill the page. A hallmark of quality professional writing is the freshness and variety of the text. Once you say something, you don’t repeat it.
3. In non-fiction self-help or business books written by artificial intelligence software, you’ll see an absence of citations or direct quotes. In professional writing, these make your document or book shine and give it validity.
4. Lack of humor. AI bots are like, well, machines. A truly humorless bunch. Allowing for a few smiles here and there in the text are not part of their rigid training.
5. Dogged, repetitious formatting. For example, introductory phrases are often repeated needlessly, because the AI bot doesn’t understand that the human reader can easily remember context.
6. Wrong information. AI algorithms will find information online that at first glance may seem relevant and accurate, but when you read it closely you see that it’s not what you want and is even misleading.
7. And one more thing… I’m a far better researcher than any AI algorithm. I know how to dig through the internet and get the information my client needs. When you want to follow the trail of a scent, you hire a bloodhound, not a toy poodle!

Recently a client sent me a book manuscript of 18,000 words. It had been written by ChatGPT. He asked me to add another 12,000 words to make it a real book. But first I had to edit the ChatGPT text. After removing the needless repetition, it was down to 9,000 words! This means that fully one-half the text was zero-calorie filler with no nutritional value. No human reader would have bothered slogging through that morass of boredom. After editing, I had to add 21,000 words to bring the manuscript up to the target word count of 30,000. Not a problem for me!

The moral of the story? If you’re serious about communicating your ideas to your readers and establishing yourself as a leader and not a follower – a lion and not a sheep – then let the AI bots write your memos and provide internet SEO fodder that no one will read anyway. For serious work that you want your readers to love, stick with a professional human writer!