I haven't seen much noise lately about the "obvious" AI tells. It used to be "delve," the em dash, the simplistic constructs—It's not this, it's that.
Seems those using AI to write have cleaned up their act. At least on the surface. Plenty of direct tells still show up in the writing. They've just become subtler. One particularly egregious habit of Claude Opus 4.5 was superdense writing that lacked any articles. As in
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Yet even if you instruct Claude and co. to "write in your voice," that only fixes word choice and sentence structure. It does nothing for substance: blowing up a few bullet points via a generic prompt into a comment on a LinkedIn post, a whole article or an entire website still produces writing that is eerily bereft of substance. You know the feeling when you eat a whole bag of candy? You're queasy and full but also largely unsatisfied. The same happens with that generic slop. Your brain senses that you're consuming empty calories and pulls the emergency brake.
It's fine for stuff nobody reads anyway. Stuff that just needs to be written, for some reason, in some format, and then shelved and never looked at (though I'd argue that in such a case, just get rid of the requirement). But writing that you want to have lasting impact (on you as the writer and on your reader) needs to be the cognitive equivalent of hand-crafted whole food, not a bag of Doritos.
