How do I make AI-written content sound less like AI?

I write a lot with AI now, and the first drafts had a smell. Fluent, competent, unmistakably machine-made. So I built a second editor that runs after every draft, with one job: strip the fingerprint that gives it away.

It does not rate whether the writing is good. It hunts specific patterns and swaps them for plain language.

Which patterns give AI writing away?

Here are the ones it catches most, and the fix for each.

Tell words. A handful of words show up in machine writing far more than in how people actually talk: delve, foster, robust, seamless. A person might use one in a long essay. The machine uses four a page. When writing leans on them, a machine probably helped, and your reader can feel it. Swap each for the plain version. "Delve into the data" becomes "look at the data."

The narrator voice. "Behind the scenes, the company has been rebuilding its checkout." Nobody speaks that way. It stages drama the writer never earned. State the fact: "The company rebuilt its checkout this year." Let the reader decide if it was a big deal.

Hedge stacking. "This might possibly work for some businesses in certain cases." Four qualifiers, no spine. One hedge per sentence, maximum. "This works for service businesses under five million."

The smart-crowd setup. "What everyone gets wrong about this is..." It invents a clueless crowd so the writer looks sharp by comparison, and no one can check it. Cut the frame and make the claim directly.

Container sentences. "That is where the real value lives." Value to do what, exactly? If the sentence cannot answer that, it is packaging. Delete it and write the actual thing.

Why does the fingerprint matter?

As more people publish with AI, that fingerprint becomes the signal that you did not really write it. Readers may not be able to name the patterns, and they still feel them. Removing the fingerprint is how your work still reads as yours, even when a machine produced the first draft.

How do you make the second pass stick?

The transferable move is the one I use everywhere. Write your taste down as a checklist, then run it as a second pass every single time, so quality stops depending on whether you are sharp that day.

A written checklist also travels. Once your standards are on paper, anyone on your team, or any AI tool you hand them to, can apply them the way you would.

Do this today

Ten minutes, one draft.

1. Take something you drafted with AI this week and search it for six words: delve, foster, robust, seamless, leverage, landscape.
2. Replace each with how you would say it out loud.

That single pass will teach you what your own fingerprint sounds like.