AI writing tells

Missing contractions

Say it out loud: "It is important to remember that you do not need permission to start." The grammar's fine. But you'd never say it. You'd say "don't," because that's how English comes out of a mouth, and your ear knows it even when your keyboard forgets.

Models drift formal as their outputs run long, and formal English quietly sheds its contractions along the way. One "it is" doesn't mean anything; you'll write that yourself for emphasis. A whole post without a single one, though? Reads like a legal notice. Detectors noticed that a while ago.

Why detectors flag it

Contraction frequency is an easy statistical fingerprint. Casual human social-media writing runs rich with contractions; AI output, unless explicitly styled, runs lean. It's also a proxy for a deeper issue: text that was never "heard" in a human voice before publishing.

What it looks like

I am convinced that we are overcomplicating this. It is not a tooling problem. It is a communication problem, and we cannot solve it by adding another dashboard.

Swap in the contractions and the same argument suddenly sounds like a person: "I'm convinced we're overcomplicating this. It's not a tooling problem…"

How to fix it

• Read it out loud. Anywhere your mouth wants a contraction your text doesn't have, add it.
• Keep the occasional full form for emphasis. "It is not." hits harder than "It isn't", but only because everything around it is contracted.