Instantly identify AI writing patterns
by ossama.is“the supervision paradox”
Invented Concept Labels
“The building serves as a reminder of the city's heritage.”
The "Serves As" Dodge
“It's not bold. It's backwards.”
Negative Parallelism
“Not a bug. Not a feature. A fundamental design flaw.”
"Not X. Not Y. Just Z."
“The result? Devastating.”
"The X? A Y."
A dynamic directory of the recurring tropes, tics and structural patterns that give away AI-generated text. For writers, editors, publishers, anyone who reads and anyone who cares.
ai;dr
Just the prompt please. 3000 words of slop, distilled back to the 30-word prompt they actually typed.
Save your attention, time and sanity (ordered by value).
AI Vetter
Drop a link. We'll tell you if it's worth reading.
7 tropes identified across 4 categories
Heavy use of negative parallelism, anaphora abuse
One-point dilution: single argument restated 8 times
Deslopify
Paste text in. Get a diff-style breakdown of every phrase, sentence and structure that reads like AI, with suggested rewrites.
1The technology is extraordinary, the demos are
2dazzling, and the marketing is relentless.
3impressive, and the marketing is aggressive.
4Yet when you look at how people actually
5work — the real workflows, the real tools, the real daily grind
6their actual day-to-day — AI sits mostly on the
7sidelines.
Can't sell the poison without selling the cure eh?
tropes.md
A single file you can drop into any AI assistant's system prompt so it avoids these patterns. Copy or download.
# AI Writing Tropes to Avoid Add this file to your AI assistant's system prompt or context to help it avoid common AI writing patterns. Source: tropes.fyi --- ## Sentence Structure ### Negative Parallelism The "It's not X -- it's Y" pattern, often with an em dash. The single most commonly identified AI writing tell. Man I f*cking hate it. AI uses this to create false profundity by framing everything as a surprising reframe. One in a piece can be effective; ten in a blog post is a genuine insult to the reader. Before LLMs, people simply did not write like this at scale. Includes the causal variant "not because X, but because Y" where every explanation is framed as a surprise reveal, the em-dash dismissal "X -- not Y", and the cross-sentence reframe where the same noun is negated then repositioned: "The question isn't X. The question is Y." **Avoid patterns like:** - "It's not bold. It's backwards." - "Feeding isn't nutrition. It's dialysis." - "Half the bugs you chase aren't in your code. They're in your head."
Why this exists
Man I am so sick of AI slop in writing. I don't think you quite understand how prevalent it is. It is disrespectful to expect ME to read something YOU could not even be bothered to write (or likely even read). The lingering human connection that remained on the internet is now being diluted even further. Many of the Hacker News posts I click on (especially sorting by new) are completely AI generated (let me not even start on Reddit posts or Twitter threads (which I don't use)). This includes several that reach the front page on a daily basis. It's shameless. Unfortunately, many of you educated readers are completely oblivious.
AI-generated text is getting harder to spot but the models still have very obvious tells.
Do not waste your time reading words that nobody wrote. Something void of character, flare, passion and risk. These tools will help you both (generously) identify AI writing and save you from having to read it.
To combat this (and because I'm petty) I built this directory that names and shames the patterns. Both to educate those are not AI-literate and to call it out! Each trope is documented with examples so you know exactly what to look for -* (not every emdash is AI I carefully selected this one) and, because I'm petty, how to call it out!
“You're a hypocrite I'm sure you use AI for writing code!” — AI generated code is fine, it's one computer (LLM) talking to another (compiler). How else do you think AI is so good at writing code? They're speaking the same language! But prose? That's from human to human, it's sacred and meant for other people. Using AI for that is deceitful.
Further reading