Writing
How to use AI without sounding like AI
Your customers can tell. Not because of any single word, and not because they are looking for it — because the writing has a shape that thousands of other emails now share, and that shape reads as nobody in particular wrote this. The good news is that the shape comes from a small number of habits, and all of them are fixable.
The seven tells
Read these against the last thing an AI drafted for you. Most drafts have four or five.
1. The warm-up paragraph
It restates the question before answering it. "Thanks for reaching out about your recent order — I completely understand how frustrating delivery delays can be." Nothing has been said yet. Human writers under time pressure open with the answer.
2. The summary at the end
A closing paragraph that repeats what the middle already said. In a four-hundred-word email nobody needs reminding what they read ninety seconds ago.
3. Everything is three things
Three bullets, three reasons, three benefits. Real situations produce two considerations, or five. A relentless rhythm of threes is a pattern in the writing rather than a pattern in the world.
4. Balance where there is none
Every point acknowledges its counterpoint. It reads as fair and it means the writer never actually decided. When a customer asks which option to take, they want your answer, not a balanced overview of both.
5. Elevated words for ordinary things
Leverage, utilise, robust, seamless, streamline, delve, comprehensive, tailored solutions. Not one of these is wrong; the density is the tell. Small businesses do not talk like this and their customers know it.
6. Enthusiasm nobody earned
Excited to share, thrilled to announce, happy to help. Occasionally true. In every message, it flattens into noise, and the one time you genuinely are pleased about something you have no way left to say so.
7. No specifics
This is the deepest one. No names, no dates, no numbers, nothing that could only be true of your business. It is the giveaway that survives every attempt to fix the others, and the reason is that it is not a style problem at all.
Edit one: delete the first paragraph and the last
Try it on the next draft before reading further. In most cases the piece is better, and you have removed two of the seven tells in about four seconds.
The opening paragraph is throat-clearing. The closing one is a summary of something short enough not to need summarising. What remains starts with the actual point, which is how a busy person writes anyway.
This works so reliably that it is worth doing automatically, then putting something back only if the piece genuinely needs it.
Edit two: add the thing only you could know
This is the edit that does the real work, and it is not a style change — it is supplying information the model never had.
A generic draft is generic because you gave it a generic brief. It does not know that this customer has ordered from you four times, that the delay is because your supplier changed courier, that you are quiet on Tuesdays, or that the part they want is discontinued and you have two left.
- One concrete detail from the actual situation beats any amount of rewriting.
- A number is worth more than an adjective. Not "a short delay" — "Thursday rather than Monday".
- Name the real cause when you can. People forgive specifics far more readily than they forgive smoothness.
- If nothing specific comes to mind, that is worth noticing. It may be that this message did not need sending.
Two sentences of genuine detail will do more than an hour of adjusting tone instructions, because the absence of detail is what was actually wrong.
Edit three: feed it your own writing
Find three things you wrote yourself — real emails to real customers, not marketing copy. Paste them in, say this is how I write, then give it the task.
Your sentence length, your directness, whether you use contractions, whether you open with a greeting, the way you close — all of it transfers without being described. Describing tone in words is unreliable; showing it is not.
Keep those three samples somewhere you can reach in five seconds and reuse them every time. This is one setup step that keeps paying.
Pick samples you are proud of, not just the most recent ones. Whatever you supply becomes the standard, including the habits you would rather not amplify.
The read-aloud test
Read the draft out loud. Not skim it — say it.
You will hear the problems immediately, because the tells above are all things nobody says out loud. Nobody says "I completely understand how frustrating that must be" to a person standing in front of them. Nobody delivers a summary of the conversation they just had.
Anywhere your voice slows down or feels awkward, cut it. Thirty seconds per email, and it catches more than any checklist.
Where sounding polished is fine
None of this means AI-assisted writing is bad writing. For internal documents, procedures, product descriptions and anything where clarity matters more than personality, a smooth competent draft is exactly right and worrying about it is wasted effort.
The tells only cost you something in writing that is meant to come from a person: replies to customers, anything with your name at the bottom, anything where the point is partly that a human is on the other end. Spend the editing time there and let the rest be efficient.
One line to keep
It does not sound like AI because of the words it chose. It sounds like AI because it had nothing to say that only you could have said — so the fix is not rewriting, it is telling it something true about the actual situation.