12 AI writing tells and the fix

You read a post, and something feels off. The words are smooth, the grammar is perfect, and yet you know a machine wrote it. I get that reaction all the time now, and it turns out there’s a clear reason for it.

I came across a brilliant breakdown from an AI professional who mapped out exactly what gives away AI-written content. The original poster listed 12 dead giveaways to cut from your writing, then paired them with 11 Claude skills that clean up the mess. I was genuinely impressed by how practical it is, so I broke the whole thing down for you here.

The core idea is simple. If your writing sounds like a chatbot, people stop trusting it. Fix the tells, and your words sound human again.

The 12 tells to delete today

The creator points out that these words and phrases almost never come out of a real person’s mouth. Once you see them, you can’t unsee them.

1. "Delve." You’ve never said it out loud, not once. It screams machine.
2. "Crucial" or "pivotal." Almost nothing is that pivotal. The word inflates everything.
3. "Tapestry." No human actually talks like this in a business post.
4. "Here’s the thing." There is no thing. It’s filler pretending to be a transition.
5. "Hope this helps." It doesn’t, and worse, it outs you instantly.
6. "After careful consideration." Usually written without any consideration at all.
7. "To provide a quick update." Just give the update. Skip the runway.
8. "Most people…" A lazy oversimplification that dodges the real point.
9. "Robust," "seamless," "realm." The corporate AI starter pack.
10. Adverb abuse. Lines like "X quietly runs Y." Nothing actually runs. It’s decoration.
11. "It’s not X, it’s Y." The most famous AI sentence structure alive.
12. "This isn’t a budget, it’s a statement of intent." That fake-deep flip fools nobody.

Why this matters: the expert notes that the patterns give you away even faster than the individual words. One robotic rhythm and your reader tunes out before they finish the sentence.

The 11 Claude skills that fix it

Here’s where it gets really useful. The mind behind this post shared the exact set of 11 skills used to scrub AI smell out of a draft. I love that each one does a single job well.

1. Writer. Writes the first draft in your structure, not Claude’s. A good draft going in means nothing to clean up later.
2. Editor. Cuts fluff and filler. Every sentence earns its place or it gets deleted.
3. Fact-checker. Kills invented stats and fake-sounding quotes. One hallucinated number and nobody trusts you again.
4. Anti-AI style. The base rewrite. It breaks the robotic rhythm where every sentence lands at the same 18 words.
5. Ban the AI words. Auto-blocks "delve," "crucial," "tapestry," and the entire red list above.
6. Ban the AI patterns. Kills "it’s not X, it’s Y" and the fake-deep endings that expose you.
7. Sound like your posts. Feed it 5 of your old posts and it writes like you, not like Claude. The creator says this one replaces every paid humanizer tool.
8. Humanizer. Strips whatever AI smell is left. Contractions in, em dashes out.
9. Red-pen. Flags your weak lines before your readers ever spot them.
10. Self-critique. Claude critiquing Claude beats Claude on the first try. It loops until the text reads clean.
11. Auto-block banned words. The safety net. Nothing on the red list ever ships again.

Why I think this is worth your time

What I appreciate about the original poster’s approach is the order of operations. You don’t just swap words. You fix the draft’s bones first, cut the filler, verify the facts, then break the rhythm, then polish. Each pass targets a different layer of that machine feel.

You can start applying this today without any special tools. Print the 12 tells and keep them next to your keyboard. Before you hit publish, scan your draft for every single one. That habit alone will make your writing sound noticeably more like a real person.

Then layer in the skill approach. Draft in your own structure, edit hard, check your facts, and read the final version out loud. If a sentence feels like something you’d never actually say to a friend, rewrite it. That’s the whole trick.

This lands right as AI-written content floods every feed. The people who stand out now are the ones who sound unmistakably human. The person who shared this gave us a clean, repeatable system to do exactly that.

Want the full breakdown with all 11 skills in the original poster’s own words? Check out the complete LinkedIn post for every detail.