When clients say your copy sounds like AI

In r/copywriting and r/freelanceWriters the complaint has flipped. Two years ago the threads were about machines taking the work. Now a lot of them are about being accused — by a client, a colleague, or a stranger in the comments — of writing like one.

One writer said they get called an AI simply because they use em dashes. Another wrote a long post about how the accusations had made them afraid to publish anything, and the replies diagnosed the post itself: it read "composed", grammatically smooth, the way edited text does. They had, in fact, run it through a model for grammar.

The words professionals name

Copywriters are unusually good at this, because naming the tell is part of the job. From the threads:

• "Quietly." One commenter picked it out as the strongest flag in current copy: used metaphorically for an action, removable from the sentence without loss, and almost absent from professional writing before 2023. Several agreed it now appears everywhere.
• "Genuinely." Named in the same thread as the model's favorite intensifier, in a line worth remembering: the people who genuinely mean it do not usually say it.
• The rule of three. Three adjectives, three benefits, three clauses in a row. One sub regular pointed out the awkward part: writers were taught this too, so the pattern convicts innocent people. The machine learned it from us.
• "It's not X, it's Y." The construction came up again here, in a thread where commenters were dissecting a post about AI slop and found the post itself built out of it.
• Composed, correct, and airless. The diagnosis of the writer above: nothing wrong with any sentence, and no reason to read the next one.
• The em dash. Contested, and worth saying plainly: plenty of writers have used em dashes for decades and are now being asked about them. The subs treat the em-dash accusation as a joke more often than a test.

What the accusations actually cost

The freelancers' threads are less about style than about trust. A writer described a client sending back LinkedIn posts their own team's assistant had generated, asking for a polish — the same assistant that had been proposed as a replacement for the writer a year earlier. Another described clients "improving" copy with ChatGPT and returning something flatter, then asking why it does not convert.

And a third, from a portfolio interview: the copy impressed the interviewer, until the writer mentioned using AI in the process. The work was good. The confession changed how it was read.

What the good writers in these threads do

• They keep the odd phrase. The detail that does not serve the pitch is usually the thing that makes the reader believe a person wrote it.
• They use the model for the work around the writing — angles to react to, customer language to mine, a first draft to argue with — not for the sentences that carry the voice.
• They read it aloud. Every thread about tells eventually reaches this: if four sentences in a row take the same breath, no word choice will save it.
• They stop editing toward the accusation. Several said the fear made their work worse before it made it safer — flatter, more hedged, less like the writer the client hired.

Our checker marks the sentences that carry these shapes and tells you which one it found, in a line. Paste a landing page, an email, a LinkedIn post. It will not tell you who wrote it — nobody can — but it will show you where the prose went smooth and empty.

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