The real sign of AI writing is not superficial stuff like “It’s not X—it’s Y”. It’s the hollowness. Polished writing but relatively mundane ideas. The giveaway is that you’re less impressed when you read it the second time. With good writing, it should be the other way around.

I’m not sure this is inherently about AI. It’s more about the fact that people tend to turn to AI when they don’t have much to say.

Reading text that has the syntactic smell of AI is mildly annoying, but when I read hollow writing I feel the writer is wasting my time, which is much more frustrating. So don’t do it. People are unlikely to respond to your email or subscribe to your newsletter or whatever you’re trying to get them to do. And they’ll probably remember that you betrayed their trust as a reader.