The AI-Tell Cheat Sheet

15 patterns that make writing read as machine-made, and that get real human writing wrongly flagged. The free teaser of the list our De-Slop editors run on.

You already feel it when you read it: a paragraph that's grammatical, confident, and somehow hollow. Here are the specific patterns behind that feeling, so you can catch them in your own drafts.

Vocabulary — the highest-density tells

1. delve — "let's delve into." Nobody delves out loud.
2. leverage (as a verb) — you mean "use."
3. robust / seamless / holistic — adjective filler that names no actual property.
4. landscape / tapestry / realm used figuratively — "the evolving landscape of."
5. "it's worth noting" — if it's worth noting, just note it.

Phrases

6. "In today's fast-paced world…" and its cousins.
7. "When it comes to X…" — almost always deletable; start with X.
8. "That being said / Having said that" — usually a "but" in a suit.
9. Rhetorical-question openers as a default — "Ever wondered…?" "Sound familiar?"

Sentence shapes

10. "Not only X, but also Y." Humans write it sometimes. AI writes it every fourth sentence.
11. "It's not just X, it's Y." Cut it; state the claim.
12. The triplet — three short fragments in a row. "Faster. Smarter. Better."

Formatting — reads as AI before the words do

13. Em-dash flooding. Not the dash, the rate. AI runs roughly 8–12× the human density. Aim under ~10 per 1,000 words.
14. Emoji section headers and a bold phrase every other sentence.
15. A header on every paragraph. Headings should mark real shifts, not every 50 words.

The part most "humanizers" skip

A detector doesn't measure honesty. It measures whether your text looks statistically like the model's training data. That's why real writing gets flagged too. The fix isn't to launder your text through a paraphraser until a classifier shrugs. It's to make the writing genuinely clearer and more specific, which reads as human because it is. More on that here.

Spotted a pattern we missed? hello@pem-way.com