Out of curiosity — and, if I'm honest, a little leftover defensiveness after the em-dash business — I took a stack of my own posts and ran them through one of the "humaniser" checklists doing the rounds: the rubrics that promise to tell you whether a piece of writing came from a person or a machine. I expected vindication. I'd written every word myself, some of it years ago, at kitchen tables and on trains and in the gap between meetings. What I got instead was a page lit up like a Christmas tree.
Not because a machine had written any of it. Because I have tics, and the checklist found every single one.
What the lists get right
I'll give them this: they are very good at holding up a mirror you didn't ask for. Mine showed me two things I genuinely hadn't noticed. The first was a word — quietly. I'd been using it as a kind of mood-lighting, dropped into a sentence to make a point feel wry and knowing without my having to earn the tone. Once the list pointed at it I found it everywhere, dozens of times, doing nothing. The second was a shape: I ended an alarming number of pieces on the same move — a tidy little reversal, it was never X, it was Y — because it feels like landing a plane. Do it once and it's satisfying. Do it in every post and it's a nervous habit with a bow on it.
That's worth knowing about yourself, and I'm glad I looked. A writer's unconscious reflexes are the hardest thing to see from the inside, and a cold, dumb checklist will surface them faster than a sympathetic editor who's learned to stop noticing.
But most of it is fashion, not fingerprint
The trouble starts with what the lists do next. Half of what they flag is guilt by association — the em dash, delve, tapestry, landscape — words and marks that turned suspicious because a chatbot leaned on them, not because there is anything wrong with them. They are perfectly good English, used well by people for a very long time. They read as "AI" today for the same reason a song gets ruined by an advert: overexposure, not content.
And fashion dates. In a few years delve will have served its sentence and gone back to being an ordinary verb, and some new word will be carrying the stigma. If you edit your writing to dodge this month's list of suspicious vocabulary, you are chasing a target that moves, and you will spend the rest of your life a step behind it, sanding the character off your sentences to pass a test nobody should be administering. I made that argument about the em dash and I'll make it about the whole word-list: the surface features are the least interesting thing about how writing sounds.
Formula was never the tell
Here's the part the checklists can't reach, and it's the part that actually matters.
A formula is not a crime. Television shows have a structure — cold open, act breaks, a button at the end — and nobody watches a sitcom and cries robot. Columnists have a recognisable shape. A sonnet is fourteen lines of pure constraint, and some of the most human writing in the language happens inside it. Structure is a kindness to the reader; it's the banister they hold on the way down. I have never once objected to a format.
What actually made parts of my own archive read like a machine wasn't that I used a device. It was that I used the same device, in the same place, every time. The same closing reversal. The same aphorism dropped into the same slot a third of the way down. One essay turning that corner is a choice. A hundred and sixty-eight essays turning it at the identical moment is a template wearing a hundred and sixty-eight different hats. And no word-level checklist can see that, because the tell doesn't live in any single sentence — it only shows up across a body of work, in the uniformity. A person drifts. A template repeats. That difference is the whole game, and it's invisible one paragraph at a time.
The messy part is the human part
So what do you do about it? The worst possible answer — the one I watch people reach for — is to write worse on purpose. Chop the sentences short, rough up the grammar, delete the dashes, add a typo, flatten yourself until you read as reassuringly clumsy. That's the em-dash mistake again, scaled up: treating care as the thing to hide.
The better answer is quieter and harder. Write with intent, and stop ironing out the unevenness. When I read my oldest posts back — the ones from before I knew what I was doing, when I was a communications person squinting at a dashboard wondering what any of it meant — they are looser, hedgier, more prone to wander off and come back. For a while that embarrassed me, and I itched to tighten them. Then I realised the wandering is the most human thing in the whole archive: the visible seam of someone getting better at this, year over year, in public. A machine's output doesn't have a learning curve. Mine does. I've stopped trying to sand it flat.
A model can copy any habit I have — the dash, the word, the favourite turn of phrase. What it can't counterfeit is a mind that changed over thirteen years of writing. The tell was never the word. It's whether anyone was home.
What I actually did about it
I went through the lot, in the end. The tics that were pure reflex — the word I'd overused into meaninglessness, the closer I reached for out of muscle memory — I cut, because they weren't carrying anything. The habits that are genuinely mine, that I use because I mean them, I kept, the em dashes loudest among them. The test I ended up applying to every flagged sentence wasn't does this look like AI. It was did I mean this, or did I just reach for it? Reflex out. Intent stays.
Because this is the thing I've believed since I first argued that a number is a message before it's a fact: writing is communication, and a reader can feel, underneath the words, whether a decision was actually made. That's the layer the machine borrowed our surface from and still can't reproduce on its own — not the vocabulary, not the punctuation, but the intent behind the choices. The checklist is a fine mirror and a terrible judge. It can tell me which of my habits are lazy. It cannot tell me which ones are me.
So I'm not going to write worse to prove I'm a person. I'm going to keep writing like someone who's paying attention, and let the checklist flag whatever it likes — which is, as far as I can tell, still the one move the machine can't make for me.