I was reviewing a batch of emails with a client last week and stopped on one line.
Not because it was wrong. Because it wasn’t his.
The giveaway? Two words. “Genuinely” and “quietly.” The second I see them, I know AI wrote the sentence and a human just nodded it through.
The other tell is the throat-clear. The little runway before the actual point:
“Here’s what I noticed years ago...”
“A big part of why this feels so hard is...”
Half the time, you can delete the whole intro and the email gets better. Instead of “a big part of why work feels so feast-or-famine is...” just say it: “The best clients I ever landed never came from a cold pitch.”
You didn’t need the runway. You needed the plane.
Here’s the shortcut I keep coming back to: AI is a great first drafter and a terrible final voice. Let it get the bones on the page fast. Then read it out loud. Every spot where you’d never actually say it that way — that’s the spot to fix.
The goal isn’t to write less with AI.
It’s to make sure the last person who touched it was you.
Matt “delete the runway” Ragland
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To your point, I've been using AI for writing for long enough that certain things stand out. While we're spotting tells, here are a few hiding in this copy:
* The subtitle written in Title Case
* "Not because it was wrong. Because it wasn't his." - a classic negative-contrast fragment pair
* "The giveaway?" - the one-word setup question
(And the em-dash—which happens to be my favorite punctuation mark, so I'm the last one who should be throwing stones, heh.)
The funny part is I agree with all of it. On Substack I draft with AI for speed and humanize from there. I just passed 1,000 consecutive days writing on LinkedIn and use the same process over there.
I've always been a good writer and a better rewriter, so this process works for me.
This right here sounds like AI…
“The goal isn’t to write less with AI.
It’s to make sure the last person who touched it was you.”
That’s the dead giveaway - start with a negative, next sentence positive
You can spot it a mile away, and everyone is doing it.