17 signs you're creating AI slop content

I spend most of my day reading other people's content, whether that's LinkedIn posts, blog articles, website copy, or a full inbox of marketing emails. Lately, I keep clocking the same patterns, and they all point to one thing:

Copy that an AI wrote without much guidance, and a human never went back to fix.

These patterns get under my skin. A few of them are plain annoying. Others sting, because they used to be moves I leaned on in my own writing, and now I second-guess them so my work doesn't read like a chatbot wrote it.

So, here's my running list of the dead giveaways. If you write with AI, and you should, because building AI content systems is a big part of what I do now, these are the things to catch before you publish.

1. The negation pivot: AI loves to set you up with a negative and then swing into a positive, as in "it's not this, it's that." Once you spot the pattern, you start seeing it in almost every generated post on your feed.
2. The edgy hook: "I might get some hate for this, but..." The line is built to sound brave, and because the framing never changes, it lands as manufactured instead.
3. "Quietly": The word turns up everywhere, usually in a phrase like "quietly killing your productivity" or "quietly growing your pipeline." When a sentence has something "quietly" doing the work, a robot probably put it there.
4. The em-dash: I love the em-dash, and I plan to keep using it, so this one stings. The problem is volume. One author reportedly rewrote a whole book after readers assumed the dashes meant a machine wrote it. Treat it like salt, not gravy.
5. Anaphora: Stacking phrases on the same opening word, like "no this, no that, no the other." A person tends to write "no this, that, or the other" and keep moving.
6. Honest: "Here's the honest take." "Let me be honest with you." The chatbots say it constantly, and when honesty needs announcing, the writing has a problem.
7. Actually: A headline promises "what readers actually want," dismissing some imaginary worse option to make the point feel sharper. It reads as a cop-out.
8. Picture this: "Picture this," or "imagine that," is AI setting a scene for you. Human writers find a hundred other ways into the same idea.
9. Lists with no "and": AI writes "planes, trains, automobiles." A person writes "planes, trains, and automobiles." Grammarly flags the first one for a reason.
10. In conclusion: Nobody talks this way out loud. The phrase is a robot clearing its throat before a recap you never asked for.
11. Clichés and buzzwords: "Let's dive in." "Leaving money on the table." Streamline, supercharge, robust, seamless, cutting-edge, unlock your potential, delve, tapestry. "The possibilities are endless." "Only time will tell." You know the lineup.
12. Remember: The forced callback, as in "remember when I said..." It works as filler dressed up to look like emphasis.
13. Big words doing small jobs: "Utilize" where "use" would do. Things like that. This one depends on your brand voice, and most of the time the ten-dollar word only makes you sound stiff.
14. The dramatic fragment: A short, punchy line dropped after a longer one for effect, such as "Like this." It works once in a while, and it becomes a tell when every paragraph ends with one.
15. No spine: Generic, non-committal copy that avoids data, examples, and any real opinion. AI will not take a stance unless you hand it one of your own, so the default output comes out beige.
16. Hedging: "It's worth noting." "It's important to remember." Padding that weakens a claim while pretending to strengthen it.
17. Emojis everywhere: They earn their place on LinkedIn, where you need a way to break up a wall of text. Inside a blog post or an email, they turn a serious point into a kids' menu.

This isn't me saying don't use AI. On the contrary, my point is to do it well. Don't just churn out slop in the interest of quantity > quality.

Keep using AI. I run it every single day, and building AI content systems for coworking operators is a big part of where Talemaker is heading. AI hands you a draft, and the work that makes the draft yours still falls to you.

When your copy reads like a prompt and a paste job, your audience can feel it. And if you could not put in the effort to make it good, you give people every reason to skip it.

So, use the tools, then give the draft the ten minutes it needs: cut the tells, add a real opinion, and make it read like a person wrote it, because one did. Right?

P.S. Yes, I used AI to help build this post. Go hunting for the tells if you want. You will not find a single one, and that is the entire point.