Formatting

Compulsive overuse of em dashes for dramatic pauses, parenthetical asides and pivot points. A human writer might use 2-3 per piece (and naturally); AI will use a lot more.

“The problem -- and this is the part nobody talks about -- is systemic.”

Headings built on a Wh-word, now the default shape the model reaches for whenever it has to name a section, whether an article heading or a slide title. A serious tell on its own, independent of what the content under the heading actually says.

“Where the market is stuck today”

Capitalising every word in a heading instead of just the first word and proper nouns. Should've captured this before but I wasn't working on slides and presentation material as frequently to realise!

“Understanding The Impact Of Modern Technology On Society”

Every bullet point or list item starts with a bolded phrase or sentence. Extremely common in Claude and ChatGPT markdown output. Almost nobody formats lists this way when writing by hand. It's a telltale sign of AI-generated documentation and blog posts and README files (especially with emojis). Eh, this one isn't so bad but it's an immediate spot when scanning a doc, most people use skills to format documents in a specific way so it is fading.

“Every single bullet point begins with a bold keyword.”

Use of unicode arrows (->), smart/curly quotes, and other special characters that can't be easily typed on a standard keyboard. Real writers typing in a text editor produce straight quotes and -> or =>. Claude in particular loves the -> arrow.

“Input → Processing → Output”