Your Brain Already Knows How To Spot AI Writing

There's this moment that keeps happening. You're reading an article, maybe three or four sentences in, and suddenly you just know. AI wrote this!

But what triggered that realisation? You didn't run any tests, but just knew.

It's the same feeling you get when someone tells you they "forgot" to text you back. You can't prove they're lying but something in your gut says they definitely saw your message and chose not to reply. That's what AI content feels like.

Most people think AI content gets spotted because of obvious tells like weird phrasing or unnatural word choices. Sometimes that happens, sure. But the real giveaway runs deeper than vocabulary. It's structural. Your brain has learned to recognise a pattern, and once you've seen it enough times, you can't unsee it.

Here's the pattern. AI writing moves through ideas in this very specific way. It introduces a concept cleanly. Then it expands on that concept with supporting information. Then it concludes the thought and moves to the next one. The whole thing runs on this explain then expand then conclude rhythm that never changes.

Humans don't write like that though. Last week I was writing an article about link building and somehow ended up spending two paragraphs talking about how my neighbour's cat keeps breaking into my house through the bathroom window. Did it have anything to do with link building? Absolutely not. Did I delete it? Also no, because that's the kind of random thing that proves a human wrote it. Of course, this does not apply to all kinds of writing. If you’re writing a technical article, you shouldn’t talk about cats. Unless that’s the topic. 

But if you’re writing for your business, why not let AI suggest stuff if you need help, but still make it your own?

Think about how you actually write emails to clients or posts on social media. You go off topic sometimes. Then you circle back to your original point. You say things like "actually, scratch that" and change your mind mid paragraph because you thought of something better while you were typing.

AI doesn't do any of this. It stays perfectly on course from start to finish. Which sounds good in theory but in practice it creates this weirdly flat reading experience where everything lands exactly where you expect it to and nothing surprises you.

So what do you do? Introduce variation deliberately. Change your pacing around. Mix up your sentence lengths dramatically. Add specific details from your actual experience, not generic examples that could apply to anyone. Tell the story about your neighbour's cat if it somehow relates to your point!

That's what makes writing feel human.