Take your last AI-written blog post and Ctrl+F for the word “delve.” Found it? Your content just outed itself to every reader who’s been online for more than five minutes.
And it’s not just “delve.” There’s a whole vocabulary of words that AI gravitates toward because they sound thorough without actually saying anything. “Stark contrast.” “Rapidly evolving landscape.” “It is worth noting.” These phrases travel in packs, and once a reader spots one, they start scanning for the rest. Trust erodes fast when that happens.
A prompt engineer on Reddit dropped a 15-point cleanup system that strips out every signal that makes AI writing sound like AI writing. Punctuation habits, filler phrases, neutral-to-the-point-of-saying-nothing tone, over-nested headings, bullet-point overload – it catches all of it. Here’s how to run it on your stuff.
🔍 Run This on Your Next Draft
Paste your AI content along with these instructions into Claude, ChatGPT, or whatever model you use.
- Fix the punctuation. Replace curly quotes with straight quotes. Replace em-dashes and en-dashes with plain hyphens. These two changes alone remove the most obvious machine fingerprints. Most word processors and AI tools auto-format quotes into the curly style, which looks polished in isolation but reads as a pattern when you see it across dozens of posts.
- Kill the AI vocabulary. Search for these and delete every instance: “delve,” “glimpse,” “stark,” “landscape,” “needless to say,” “in today’s world,” “it is important to note,” and the classic “it’s not just X, it’s also Y.” None of these say anything. They just take up space. A useful test: if you removed the sentence entirely, would the paragraph lose any actual information? If no, cut it.
- Cut the repetition. AI loves to make the same point three times in three different paragraphs because it sounds thorough. Find the echoes and delete them. Say it once, say it well, move on. A good trick is to read only your first and last sentences of each paragraph – if they say the same thing, one of them is dead weight.
- Add an actual opinion. AI writes in a neutral tone by default. Neutral reads as boring and forgettable. Pick something in the piece and take a clear position on it. Not “there are pros and cons to this approach.” Something real, like “this approach is overrated and here’s why” or “most people skip this step and it shows.” Readers remember opinions. They forget summaries.
- Fix the flow. Read from top to bottom. Where one section jumps awkwardly into the next, add a single bridging sentence. Don’t overdo it – only where the gap is obviously jarring. A smooth transition doesn’t have to be fancy. Sometimes it’s just one sentence that reminds the reader why the next section matters.
- Convert half your bullet lists to prose. If your post is mostly bullet points, pick the ones that aren’t genuinely list-shaped and rewrite them as short paragraphs. Lists work for comparisons, steps, and feature breakdowns. For everything else, they just fragment the read. Three bullets in a row where each one is a full sentence is just a paragraph with extra formatting doing unnecessary work.
- Flatten the headings. If you’ve got H3s nested inside H4s, you’ve gone too deep. Consolidate into fewer, broader sections. The reader should feel a natural progression, not navigate a filing system. A good rule: if a subheading covers fewer than three sentences, absorb it into the paragraph above.
What Good Output Looks Like
After running this, your post should read like a person wrote it on a focused afternoon – opinionated, easy to follow, and clean without being dumbed down. If it still sounds hollow after cleanup, the original draft was too thin to begin with. The prompt fixes signals, not substance. A weak argument with no supporting detail will survive all seven steps and still bore everyone who reads it.
The fix there isn’t more cleanup – it’s going back to the draft and asking what concrete example, data point, or specific scenario is actually missing. Cleanup and content work are two different passes. Don’t try to do both at once.
One thing the Reddit comments flagged: this works across languages too. The em-dash and quote conventions are English-specific, but the structural fixes apply pretty much everywhere. Repetition, over-bulleting, and buried opinions are AI habits regardless of what language the output lands in.
💡 A Few Extra Tips
- Read the final version out loud before publishing. Your ear catches things your eyes skip right over. Specifically, it catches sentences that run too long, transitions that feel forced, and any spot where you’d naturally pause but the text barrels through without stopping.
- Run a keyword density check if the draft was SEO-optimized. AI stuffs keywords in ways that feel unnatural, and the prompt flags it but manual review catches what the model misses. A keyword appearing four times in 600 words is usually fine. Seven times is a tell.
- Save this prompt somewhere you’ll actually reach for it. The best cleanup system is the one you use every time, not the one buried in some folder you forget exists. A pinned note, a browser bookmark, a recurring checklist item – whatever fits how you actually work.
- Run cleanup before you add images or format for publishing. It’s easier to cut and restructure text when it’s still plain. Once it’s inside your CMS with formatting locked in, small edits feel bigger than they are and you end up leaving things that should have been cut.
✍️ Prompt of the Day
Take any AI draft you’ve published in the last month. Run the 15-point cleanup on it. Then read the original and the cleaned version back to back. The difference usually shows up in the first three paragraphs – and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Pay attention to how different the cleaned version feels to read, not just how different it looks. That gap between the two versions is exactly what your readers were silently noticing before you fixed it.
Try it and let us know what it catches in your content!
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Won’t simplifying the writing make it feel less sophisticated?
Not really, it does the opposite. When you cut out all the AI filler (the “delves” and “landscapes”), your actual ideas get more space to land. People remember clear, direct writing way better than flowery language. Real sophistication is about what you’re saying, not how many syllables you use to say it.
Q: Can you use this prompt for other languages?
Yes. The formatting fixes (straight quotes, hyphens instead of dashes) work across any language. The AI phrases part is language-specific, you’ll need to adapt the actual overused terms for your target language. One reader mentioned adapting it to Italian, so it’s definitely portable with a little tweaking.
Q: What do people mean by “Retro-AI”?
It’s a clever way to describe what’s happening: you keep all your modern knowledge and insights, but write it the way people did before AI took over, direct, simple, no unnecessary complexity. You’re not dumbing it down. You’re just removing the filler that makes AI-written stuff sound like AI-written stuff.
I made a prompt that fixes AI-written content.
by u/Slight_Republic_4242 in PromptEngineering