10/09/2026
Everyone's playing "spot the AI" wrong.
Half of the internet is smug about catching AI-written content. The other half is anxious about getting caught and cancelled for using it; or being accused of it even when they didn't.
Do not judge, or you too will be judged. (Matthew 7:1)
Worth remembering before you start policing other people's work.
I recently sat an AI-detection evaluation rating real content as "AI slop" or "not slop" against expert-graded answers. I scored 95%. So here's some tips.
What surprised me: the tells had nothing to do with whether AI wrote it.
Brontë and Shakespeare have both been flagged as "AI-written" by detection tools. Because AI was trained on good writing. So "this sounds like AI" now just means "this is good." Calling good copy "AI slop" isn't detection. It's illiteracy dressed up as instinct.
The actual tells are structural:
→ Em dashes used more than once as a flourish
→ Vertical bars and stray dots doing the job punctuation should do
→ Stubby sentences that don't flow into each other
→ Slogan fragments instead of full sentences like "Freedom for every day," "Built to move business"
→ Important-sounding nouns that carry zero information like "productivity," "digital experiences," "integrated services"
→ Groupings that don't logically belong together like electric cars bundled with "software & digital" like they're one category
→ Hedge phrases that pad without adding meaning like "there are times when you might consider"
→ Repeated intensifiers doing no work like "additional disruption," "major landlords... major hurdle"
→ Corporate throat-clearing and disclaimers that could be deleted with zero loss
→ Overly complex phrasing that sounds smart but says nothing on a second read
None of these are about AI. They're about editing; clarity, delivering on the brief, copywriting rules as old as language itself.
A tired human writes the exact same slop. AI just does it faster and more consistently.
It's not about whether AI was used. It's about whether it was edited by someone with taste.
What's the tell that gets you?
