The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI

[littlemissmartypants]

Look closely and you’ll see that every part of the text is not quite right.

By Eve Fairbanks
May 29, 2026

A few weeks ago, where I live in Johannesburg, a man ran a stop sign and crashed into my Subaru. At the scene he was frantic, unable to gather his thoughts. Half an hour later, I received a lengthy, perfectly grammatical text from him elegantly explaining how he perceived the crash had happened. For a repair quote, I wrote to a mechanic I know, a man who used to text me in curt phrases riddled with shorthand. I got a response using just the same voice as the man who’d crashed into me—the distinctive voice of AI.

In surveys, people consistently say they distrust AI-generated writing. But that hasn’t stopped more and more of us from using it in everyday life—to compose work emails and personal texts, to make shopping lists, even to write scripts for arguments with our spouses. “I feel like I’m going nuts,” the writer Jason Koebler complained in the tech outlet 404 Media, under “the cognitive load” of trying to discern whether every piece of text he reads is real or fake.

AI writing is also creeping into our most elite literary spaces—newspapers’ opinion sections, books, literary magazines. I edit professionally, often working with authors renowned for their prose. Maybe two months ago, I began receiving a kind of submission I’d never gotten before: perfectly clean, without a stray comma; uniform in length, with evenly paced paragraphs and a distinctive tone that was simultaneously breezy and grandiose. At first I was surprised that people who prided themselves on their writing would turn to AI to write for them. Even six months ago, when I occasionally identified a paragraph in a writer’s work that seemed AI-generated, they would apologize.

Now some authors tell me they’ve embraced AI as a “writing tool,” no different from spell-check or a laptop. The phrase is protean and euphemistic, covering everything from using ChatGPT to find a quote to having it compose a long essay based on a two-sentence prompt. The reason for the change is simple: Competition in journalism and academia and grant writing and even YouTube influencing is insanely fierce. The edge goes to those who can stand out in a deluge of content, which is achieved through cleanly packaged messaging and sheer volume. Even professional communicators who are confident in their writing and unsure that AI is a perfect replacement are under increasing pressure to use it, so long as they feel they’re doing so within their profession’s boundaries. (The Atlantic, for the record, prohibits writers from using AI-generated text unless it’s explicitly identified as such.)
More...
Archive: https://archive.is/20260611180217/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/how-to-tell-ai-writing/687345/
Original:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/how-to-tell-ai-writing/687345/

[belpejic]

1. I use lots of em dashes and semicolons in my professional writing anyway

I ran a piece of my professional writing from 2020--definitely before AI--through a free, online AI detection tool and it reported that 64% of my text was likely AI-generated. What to do?

[FakeNoose]

2. Maybe throw a few minor errors in there, like a misplaced comma or something?

For myself I'd never use AI to "help" me compose an essay or a letter. But that's just me. Others don't have as much confidence in their abilities, I suppose.