engineer_comp_geek:
Usually it’s not because the writing is “good”, it’s because AI tends to follow certain patterns when it creates content.
Excessive use of em dashes is one of the common tells of AI. ChatGPT and other AI systems just love em dashes and use them significantly more often than a real human would.
Another tell is that AI will make a bunch of points and will then often summarize what it just wrote, where a human would consider the point to be already made and wouldn’t bother summarizing.
Also, when making a bunch of points, AI will often use bullet points, even in casual conversation. Humans don’t tend to use bullet points in that way in a casual post.
AI writing often has a particular cadence that is attempting to emulate human writing, but fails due to the predictable way that it uses it. Once you get familiar with AI posts it is very easy to pick up on this cadence.
AI tends to use excessive bolding and italics in a way that humans don’t.
When people recognize these patterns, they get annoyed that it’s AI slop and not a real post. They aren’t complaining because the writing is better than what they could produce on their own. In my experience, the only people complaining that AI is so much better than what they could do are lazy students who need to write a paper for school.
Another one is that when Ai is used to create content, the post will have three hands.
Stupid people are stupid. They read that AI uses em-dashes a lot, so they jump on any post that uses em-dashes as though it’s a “gotcha!” It makes them feel “in the know”. It just makes them look like dumb sheep.
It’s also becoming another excuse people on reddit use to justify ignoring you when they can’t cope with what you are saying:
“you made a valid point about evidence based medicine but I can ignore you because I accuse you of being a shill for Big Pharma”
“you made a valid point but it upsets me so I can ignore you because I accuse you of being a troll”
“you made a valid point but you write too clearly so I can ignore you because I accuse you of being A.I. “
You just have to leave them to their excuses and not worry about it.
DPRK
August 5, 2026, 6:43am
25
Hyphens, em dashes, en dashes, and minus signs are all different.
The massive influx of AI-generated on Wikipedia is viewed by a lot of editors as an existential threat to the integrity of the encyclopedia. As a result, a fairly detailed page listing various ways to identify AI text has been created and is continually updated as AIs evolve.
This is a list of writing and formatting conventions typical of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, with real examples taken from Wikipedia articles, drafts, comments, and other content. It is a field guide to help detect undisclosed AI-generated content on Wikipedia: while some of the signs may be broadly applicable, some may not apply in a non-Wikipedia context.[a] Not all text featuring these indicators is AI-generated, as the large language models that power AI chatbots are trained on human writing,...