Anti-AI Writing Patterns

A reference for finding the traces that make text read as machine-written, and editing them out. The catalog follows Wikipedia's "Signs of AI writing" page, maintained by WikiProject AI Cleanup.

Each pattern is a symptom of a writing problem: vagueness, puffery, filler, formula. Fix the problem, not the marker. Swapping "delve" for "dig into" changes nothing a reader cares about, and the Wikipedia page itself warns that treating its signs as markers to scrub only makes machine text harder to recognize. The goal is text that serves its reader. Getting past an AI detector is not a goal.

How to use this guide

1. Read the ground rules. They outrank every pattern.
2. Identify the language and the register of the text.
3. Mark the tells. Patterns are strong unless marked weak alone: a strong pattern justifies an edit on one sighting, a weak-alone pattern only with other tells nearby or when it is plainly bad writing.
4. Follow the Process at the end of this file, and reply in the format the caller asked for.