Two pieces of writing carry the same information, yet one reads like a person wrote it and the other feels off somehow. Pick the awkward one apart line by line and the grammar is correct, the word choices are fine. And still, when you reach the end, something feels empty.
What makes the difference is voice and style. The smallest unit of choice decides the largest impression. This piece lays out the patterns that make writing "smell like AI," and the concrete ways to scrub that smell out. It's a story for solo publishers, content writers, and anyone who writes for their business.
The "AI Smell" Isn't a Matter of Taste
Let me make one thing clear up front. The peculiar awkwardness of AI-written text isn't simply a problem of the label "a machine wrote it." There are patterns you can measure, linguistically.
A study by a Carnegie Mellon team, published in PNAS, analyzed the writing of GPT-4o and Llama 3 and confirmed the following. Even when asked to write in a casual, conversational register, instruction-tuned large language models used nouns, determiners, and prepositions far more often than humans did. They went the other way on adjectives, adverbs, personal pronouns, and epistemic markers — the words that hedge and signal a point of view — using them less.
Put plainly: AI tilts toward a noun-heavy, information-dense style, and it can't reproduce the stylistic range and personal voice that show up in human writing. On the same topic, human authors' texts spread into a wide, heterogeneous cluster, while LLM outputs bunch tightly together by model — strikingly uniform.
That uniformity is what the "AI smell" really is. And a person's own writing, if it follows the AI patterns, produces the same awkwardness. The reverse holds too: scrub these patterns out of an AI-generated draft and it reads as human.
Eight Patterns to Cut
There's a set of typical patterns that make writing smell like AI. Learn each one and, reading your own draft, you'll see where to fix it.
Pattern 1. Declarative Overreach
The most common pattern, and the most fatal. A sentence throws out a sweeping verdict without the evidence to carry its weight.
Bad — "AI is changing everything." "This is the age of revolutionary change." "It produces overwhelming results." "It redefines the very essence of publishing." "This is the heart of the future."
Why do these ring false? Because, against the size of the claim, there's no concrete detail to back it up. The sentence comes out smooth and hollow.
Good — "In this one area, AI is making a difference." "A different approach than before is now possible." "Thirty Korean publishers have adopted this tool."
Shrink the size of the claim and replace it with a concrete case or a number. A small statement earns more trust than a grand assertion.
Pattern 2. Nominalization
The habit of expressing an action as a noun instead of a verb. It often creeps in from prose translated too literally out of English.
Bad — "conduct a review," "hold a meeting," "make an effort," "perform decision-making," "carry out an analysis," "the importance of change."
Good — "review," "meet," "try," "decide," "analyze," "change matters."
Put actions in verbs and states in adjectives. The pile of nouns shrinks and the sentence lightens.
Pattern 3. Translationese
Phrasing that reads as if an English sentence were carried straight across into another language — constructions no one actually uses in everyday speech.
Bad — "We at the Company are striving to provide our valued customers with service of the highest caliber." "In this study, it was sought to derive the following." "The following items are included as such." "This is a fact of great importance."
Good — "We try to give customers the best service." "This study set out to find ___." "Here's what's included." "This matters."
Swap the borrowed passive voice and stiff formality for active voice and language people actually use.
Pattern 4. Uniform Sentence Rhythm
When every sentence runs about the same length, the writing goes monotone. It's the most conspicuous trait of AI text.
Bad (all about the same length) — "The age of AI has arrived. The tools are evolving. Users are changing too. The market is being reshaped."
Good (rhythm that shifts) — "The age of AI is here. As the tools evolve and users change, the whole terrain of the market is being redrawn once more."
Or —
"The tools are changing. Fast. And the ripples that change sends out are surfacing everywhere in the market at once."
Mix short and long sentences on purpose. A one-word sentence is fair game. Sentence rhythm is what gives writing its breath.
Pattern 5. The AI Opening and Closing
AI has a signature way of starting and ending a piece. It's grown so familiar that a single line is enough to trip the alarm.
Bad openings — "Today we live in an age of ___." "Recently, ___ has been drawing attention." "Let's take a look at ___." "In this piece, we'll explore ___."
Bad closings — "In conclusion, we must ___." "It will be exciting to see the changes ahead." "All of this means ___." "In closing, ___."
A good opening starts from something concrete. A scene, a quote, a number, an event. "Kwak Seok-young, an MBA student at Stanford, had decided to start an AI company and was torn over whether to stay in Korea or move to the U.S." A first sentence like that pulls the reader in.
A good closing compresses the whole piece into a single sentence without adding new information. "The bottleneck was never the code. For fifty years it only looked like code."
Pattern 6. Connective Overload
The habit of caulking every gap between sentences with connectives like "therefore," "as a result," "moreover," "furthermore," and "meanwhile."
Bad — "AI tools are advancing. Therefore the user base is growing. Moreover the market is expanding. As a result new opportunities are being created. Furthermore this affects the entire industry."
Good — "AI tools are advancing. The user base grows, the market expands. New opportunities open up. The whole industry sits inside that wave."
The logic carries even without the connectives. If anything, the more of them you stack, the more mechanical the writing sounds. More than two in one paragraph — cut them down on purpose.
Pattern 7. Overdone Politeness
Even within a courteous register, deference laid on too thick reads as awkward.
Bad — "We would be most grateful if you would kindly ___." "We humbly wish to inform our esteemed readers." "We respectfully recommend ___ to our valued customers."
Good — "Try this." "A note for readers." "We recommend ___ to customers."
Stay polite, but keep the phrasing direct and clear. You build warmth and the weight stays alive.
Pattern 8. Jammed-Together Words
This one is specific to Korean: the habit of artificially compressing the natural spacing between words. (Korean uses spaces to separate phrases, and AI tends to clamp them together to look more technical.)
Bad — 디지털전환, AI도구, 콘텐츠제작자, 사용자경험 (the phrases run together with no space).
Good — 디지털 전환 ("digital transformation"), AI 도구 ("AI tools"), 콘텐츠 제작자 ("content creator"), 사용자 경험 ("user experience").
The compressed spelling is meant to look like specialized terminology, but to a Korean reader it simply reads as off. Natural spacing makes the line easier to read.
Five Things Good Writing Has
Cutting the patterns isn't enough on its own. There are qualities you have to chase down on purpose.
Concreteness
Use concrete cases, numbers, quotes, and scenes instead of abstract nouns.
Bad — "Companies' adoption of AI is progressing rapidly."
Good — "More than 320 franchise owners of Mega MGC Coffee, a Korean budget-coffee chain, have launched a class-action suit against the head office."
Abstractions don't stay in the head. Specifics do. The same message, run through a concrete case, is the one that takes a seat in the reader's memory.
Everyday Words
Favor plain, native words over heavy formal ones, and easy phrasing over difficult terms.
Bad — "Profit maximization through efficient operations must be pursued."
Good — "Tune the operation in small ways and the margins come back to life."
Same meaning, different breath. The words you use in everyday life lodge harder.
The Author's Breath
Carry a quoted person's words exactly as they said them, but fill the sentences that connect them with the writer's own breath. That structure — quotation crossing with the writer's voice — gives a piece dimension.
Shifting Rhythm
Mix short sentences with long ones. A flat assertion, then an elaboration; an elaboration, then a short assertion. That rhythm is what makes writing live and move.
Machines produce a uniform rhythm. People produce a rhythm that changes with their breathing. Put rhythm into a piece on purpose and the naturalness comes alive.
The First Sentence and the Last
These are the two seats that decide the impression of the whole piece.
Good first-sentence patterns
A concrete scene — "Kwak Seok-young, an MBA student at Stanford, ..."
A provocative claim — "The code was never the bottleneck."
A striking number — "$40 billion is more than double the Korean government's annual R&D budget."
An unexpected fact — "More and more restaurants are choosing not to use AI."
Good last-sentence patterns
"The bottleneck was never the code. For fifty years it only looked like code." "If I don't know the cost structure of a 1,500-won (just over a dollar) cup of coffee, then someone else is designing that structure for me." "Today's market is telling us that the time to find that path is running short."
Add no new information. Compress the whole piece into one sentence. Make the single line that stays with the reader.
A Checklist for Catching Yourself
There's a practical way to check whether your own writing smells like AI.
1. Reread your first sentence. If it opens with "Today," "Recently," or "Let's take a look at," rewrite it. Start over with a concrete scene or a number.
2. Mark the connectives. Highlight every "therefore," "as a result," "moreover," and "meanwhile" as if with a marker. If a paragraph holds two or more, pull half of them and read it again. If the flow still carries, pulling them was right.
3. Count your sentence lengths. If the sentences in a paragraph all run about the same length, deliberately rebuild some short and some long. Make a rhythm.
4. Check the size of your claims. Look for words like "revolutionary," "overwhelming," and "fundamental." See whether the same paragraph holds a concrete case or number that justifies the word. If not, cut the word or add the case.
5. Turn nouns back into verbs. Find your "conduct a ___," "perform a ___," and "the ___-ness of ___" and switch them to verb or adjective forms.
6. Read it out loud. Check whether it flows naturally when you say it. The spots where you stumble and stall are the spots to fix.
7. Look again at the first 500 characters and the last 200. These decide the impression of the whole piece. If the opening is stale, the body goes unread no matter how good it is. If the ending is stale, a good message scatters.
Run through just these seven on purpose and the surface of your writing changes.
Writing as a Tool
One last thing to note. We're in an era where writing is no longer mere self-expression but a tool of business and work.
A column written by a solo entrepreneur, a book introduction written by a publisher, a report written by a planner. Every one of these is the medium that carries your work to the outside world. When the writing smells like AI, the work behind it looks lighter too. When your own breath is alive in the writing, that work is delivered with more weight.
The faster AI can produce writing, the sharper the difference that human writing makes. Use the tool as a tool, but never drop the final step of refining it with your own breath. That is the single most important thing about writing in the age of AI.
Reread your own writing. See how many of the eight patterns above are in it. Smooth each one out, one at a time. Even when the same information sits in the same format, whether your own breath lives inside it decides the writing's fate.
Good writing isn't hard. It just has to be deliberate. One conscious check — of what you're writing and how you're writing it — lifts a piece two levels.
The faster the tools get, the more the spots a human hand has touched shine. How you'll leave those spots in your own writing is the central question of writing in the age of AI.
