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Worried your writing sounds like AI? These tools can help
As AI-generated content becomes increasingly prevalent, brands must adapt their communication strategies to maintain authenticity and avoid the pitfalls of sounding robotic. Tools like the LLM cliché highlighter and Slop Tells are emerging to help writers identify and eliminate AI tells, ensuring that their messaging remains genuine and engaging. This shift highlights the importance of human touch in brand storytelling amidst the rise of AI technologies.
FastCompany: Today, AI -generated writing is not just found in conversations with chatbots, but in a major chunk of all LinkedIn posts, Substack articles, and tweets ; in medical papers ; and even in published literature . You’re not imagining it—as we collectively consume more of this content, some of its quirks start to feel glaringly obvious. And honestly? In this paragraph alone, I’ve already used three idioms that might set off your AI alarm bells. Now, multiple designers are building their own tools to help other writers avoid the same mistakes.
Recently, companies like LinkedIn and Substack have introduced their own moderation efforts to cut back on fully AI-generated text. Meanwhile, AI detection tools like Pangram and Turnitin are helping universities and organizations suss out AI-generated content in application essays and work documents. For the writers themselves, though, AI detection isn’t the problem: Increasingly, writers who use no AI at all are beginning to worry about their work containing an inadvertent AI tell.
“What’s interesting is that these models do speak in a specific way, and you develop a sense of it—you develop the smell of the writing,” says George Strakhov, founder of the AI automation consultancy move38 and creator of the AI style linter Slop Tells . To put human writing through the AI smell test, designers like Strakhov are starting to make their own interfaces to catalog and highlight key bits of phrasing, formatting styles, and specific words that are making your prose sound like it came from a robot. Here are two that you should know about.
LLM cliché highlighter The LLM cliché highlighter , designed by programmer Simon Willison and published to his X on August 28, is a strong first step for writers looking to identify AI jargon in their work. The tool tracks 38 different signs of AI writing, including rhetorical tics like “The punchline is,” “Here’s the twist,” and “Don’t take my word for it.” Users input the text they’d like to test into a window (or copy the link to an entire article) and the tool will highlight any flagged sentences in light yellow and direct AI tell matches in a darker yellow.
It will also present a counter at the top of the page displaying the total number of flagged sentences, matches, and chain items (patterns like “no X, no Y”) that showed up throughout the text. [Screenshot: LLM Cliché Highlighter ] Given its clear visual approach, the cliché highlighter is a solid choice to get an initial sense of how AI-saturated your text is reading. However, the tool’s scope is fairly limited, and it’s not designed to evolve with the changing LLM landscape.
Slop Tells According to Strakhov, AI tells are constantly changing as chatbots evolve and people evolve with them—which is why he designed his tool, Slop Tells, to constantly reassess which phrases, words, and constructions are no longer passing the AI smell test. Back in 2024, the word “delve” was practically unavoidable when talking with ChatGPT, despite the fact that it’s a fairly uncommon word for most American English speakers. At the time, experts theorized that this pattern was due to the outsourcing of reinforcement learning for ChatGPT to human workers in Nigeria, who use “delve” much more frequently in common speech.
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The article addresses a significant challenge in the brand industry as AI-generated content rises, providing novel tools to maintain authenticity, which is highly relevant for brand strategy professionals.