Two pieces of writing can carry the same information, yet one reads like a person wrote it and the other feels subtly off. Take the awkward one apart line by line and you find nothing wrong: the grammar is correct, the vocabulary apt. Still, you finish reading and something feels hollow.
What makes the difference is voice and style. The smallest choices determine the largest impressions. This piece lays out the patterns that give writing an “AI smell,” and concrete ways to remove them. It applies to solo publishers, content creators, and anyone who writes for their business.
The “AI Smell” Is Not a Matter of Taste
Let's be clear about one thing first. The peculiar stiffness of AI-generated text is not a labeling effect—“it feels off because I know a machine wrote it.” There are linguistically measurable patterns behind it.
A Carnegie Mellon research team, in a study published in PNAS, analyzed the writing of GPT-4o and Llama 3 and confirmed the following: even when asked to write in an informal, conversational register, instruction-tuned large language models used nouns, determiners, and prepositions at markedly higher rates than humans. Conversely, they used fewer adjectives, adverbs, personal pronouns, and epistemic markers.
In plain terms: AI leans toward a noun-heavy, information-dense style, and it fails to reproduce the stylistic variety and personal voice that mark human writing. Texts by human authors on the same topic form broad, heterogeneous clusters, while LLM outputs cluster tightly by model, showing high uniformity.
That uniformity is what the “AI smell” actually is. And human writing that follows AI-style patterns produces the same stiffness. The reverse holds, too: even a machine-generated draft reads as human once those patterns are scrubbed out.
Eight Patterns to Eliminate
Certain telltale patterns make writing smell like AI. Learn them, and you can read your own work and see exactly where to operate.
Pattern 1: Grand declarations
The most common pattern, and the most damaging. A sentence makes a sweeping claim without the evidence to carry its weight.
Bad — “AI is changing everything.” — “We live in an era of revolutionary change.” — “It delivers overwhelming results.” — “It redefines the very essence of publishing.” — “This is the heart of the future.”
Why do these feel off? Because nothing concrete backs up the size of the claim. The sentences come out smooth but empty.
Good — “In this particular area, AI is making a real difference.” — “An approach that wasn't possible before is now within reach.” — “Thirty Korean publishers have adopted this tool.”
Shrink the claim and replace it with specific examples or numbers. A small statement earns more trust than a grand assertion.
Pattern 2: Nominalized phrasing
The habit of expressing actions as nouns rather than verbs. In Korean this often creeps in through stiff translations from English; in English itself, it's the buried-verb style of bureaucratic copy.
Bad — “conduct a review” — “convene a meeting” — “make an effort” — “perform decision-making” — “carry out an analysis” — “the importance of change”
Good — “review” — “meet” — “try” — “decide” — “analyze” — “change matters”
Express actions as verbs and states as adjectives. The noun pileup thins out and the sentences get lighter.
Pattern 3: Translationese
Phrasing that reads as if an English sentence were transposed into Korean word for word—constructions no Korean speaker would ever use in daily life. Every language has its version of this; in English, it's the stilted boilerplate of corporate and academic prose.
Bad — “The Company endeavors to provide its esteemed customers with service of the highest caliber.” — “The present study sought to derive the following findings.” — “Included are items such as the following.” — “This constitutes a fact of great importance.”
Good — “We try to give our customers the best service we can.” — “This study looked for X.” — “Here's what's included.” — “This matters.”
Swap the formal passives and officialese for active voice and natural speech.
Pattern 4: Uniform sentence rhythm
When every sentence runs about the same length, the writing goes flat. This is the single most conspicuous trait of AI text.
Bad (every sentence the same length) — “The AI era has arrived. Tools are evolving. Users are changing. The market is being reshaped.”
Good (rhythm that varies) — “The AI era is here. As tools evolve and users change with them, the entire terrain of the market is being redrawn once more.”
Or
— “The tools are changing. Fast. And the ripples of that change are surfacing all across the market at once.”
Mix short sentences and long ones deliberately. A one-word sentence is allowed. The rhythm of the sentences creates the breathing of the piece.
Pattern 5: Stock openings and closings
AI has a signature way of beginning and ending a piece. The formula has become so familiar that a single line is enough to set off the alarm.
Bad openings — “Today, we live in an era of X.” — “Recently, X has been drawing attention.” — “Let's take a look at X.” — “In this article, we will examine X.”
Bad closings — “In conclusion, we must do X.” — “We look forward to the changes ahead.” — “All of this means X.” — “In closing, …”
A good opening starts with something concrete: a scene, a quote, a number, an event. “Kwak Seok-young, an MBA student at Stanford, decided to start an AI company—then agonized over whether to stay in Korea or move to the United States.” A first sentence like that pulls the reader in.
A good closing compresses the entire piece into one sentence without adding new information. “The bottleneck was never the code. For fifty years, it merely looked like one.”
Pattern 6: Conjunctive-adverb overload
The habit of caulking every gap between sentences with “therefore,” “as a result,” “furthermore,” “moreover,” “meanwhile.”
Bad: “AI tools are advancing. Therefore, users are growing. Furthermore, the market is expanding. As a result, new opportunities are being created. Moreover, this affects the entire industry.”
Good: “AI tools are advancing. Users are growing, and the market is expanding. New opportunities are being created. The whole industry sits inside that ripple.”
The logic flows without the connectives. If anything, the more of them you use, the more mechanical the writing sounds. More than two in a single paragraph is the threshold for a conscious cut.
Pattern 7: Overdone politeness
Korean prose for general readers is normally written in a polite register to begin with. But even there, stacking on extra deference makes the writing go syrupy and strange—the equivalent, in English, of relentlessly obsequious customer-service copy.
Bad — “We humbly ask that our esteemed readers kindly proceed as follows.” — “We would like to respectfully provide guidance to our valued readers.” — “We wish to courteously recommend X to our honored customers.”
Good — “Try this.” — “A note for readers.” — “We recommend X to customers.”
Stay direct and plain even while being polite. You keep the warmth—and the writing gets its weight back.
Pattern 8: Compressed compounds
The habit of artificially squeezing out the spaces Korean naturally puts between words.
Bad — “디지털전환” (digitaltransformation) — “AI도구” (AItools) — “콘텐츠제작자” (contentcreators) — “사용자경험” (userexperience)
Good — “디지털 전환” (digital transformation) — “AI 도구” (AI tools) — “콘텐츠 제작자” (content creator) — “사용자 경험” (user experience)
The compressed spelling is an attempt to look like technical vocabulary, but to Korean readers it simply reads as stiff. Natural spacing improves readability.
Five Marks of Good Writing
Removing the patterns is not enough. There are qualities to pursue actively, and they are a separate list.
Concreteness
Use specific examples, numbers, quotes, and scenes instead of abstract nouns.
Bad: “Companies are adopting AI at a rapid pace.”
Good: “Some 320 franchise owners of Mega MGC Coffee launched a class-action suit against the chain's headquarters.”
Abstraction doesn't stick in the mind. Specifics do. Given the same message, the version that passes through a concrete example is the one that takes up residence in the reader's memory.
Everyday vocabulary
Favor plain native words over formal Sino-Korean vocabulary—in English terms, plain words over Latinate formality—and easy phrasing over difficult terms.
Bad: “We must pursue profit maximization through efficient operations.”
Good: “Tighten up the operations, piece by piece, and the margins come back to life.”
Same meaning, different breath. The words people use in daily life land harder.
The writer's own breath
Quote people verbatim, but fill the connective tissue between quotes with your own cadence. The interplay between quoted voices and the writer's voice gives a piece its dimension.
Rhythm that varies
Mix short sentences with long ones. A flat assertion, then elaboration; elaboration, then a short assertion. That rhythm is what makes writing move like a living thing.
Machines produce uniform rhythm. People produce rhythm that shifts with their breathing. Put rhythm into your writing deliberately, and the naturalness comes back.
The first sentence and the last
Two positions that decide the impression of the entire piece.
Patterns for a good first sentence
A concrete scene — “Kwak Seok-young, an MBA student at Stanford…”
A provocative assertion — “Code was never the bottleneck.”
A striking number — “Forty billion dollars is more than double the Korean government's annual R&D budget.”
An unexpected fact — “A growing number of restaurants are refusing to use AI.”
Patterns for a good last sentence
— “The bottleneck was never the code. For fifty years, it merely looked like one.” — “If I don't understand the cost structure of a 1,500-won (roughly one-dollar) cup of coffee, someone else is designing that structure for me.” — “Today's market is telling us that the time left to find that path is shrinking.”
Add no new information. Compress the whole piece into one sentence. Leave the reader a single line to carry away.
A Checklist for Auditing Your Own Writing
There is a practical way to check whether your own writing carries the AI smell.
1. Reread your first sentence. If it opens with “today,” “recently,” or “let's take a look at,” rewrite it. Start over from a concrete scene or a number.
2. Mark the conjunctive adverbs. Highlight every “therefore,” “as a result,” “furthermore,” and “meanwhile.” If a paragraph has more than two, cut half and reread. If the flow survives, the cut was correct.
3. Count your sentence lengths. If the sentences in a paragraph all run about the same length, recast some deliberately short and some deliberately long. Build a rhythm.
4. Audit the size of your claims. Find words like “revolutionary,” “overwhelming,” “fundamental.” Check whether the same paragraph contains a concrete example or number big enough to justify them. If not, drop the word or add the evidence.
5. Turn nouns back into verbs. Find every “conduct an X,” “perform an X,” and “the X-ness of Y,” and rewrite them as verbs or adjectives.
6. Read it aloud. Check whether the writing flows naturally when spoken. Wherever you stumble is where to revise.
7. Revisit the first 500 characters and the last 200. These decide the impression of the whole piece. If the opening is stale, even a good body goes unread. If the ending is stale, a good message scatters.
Run just these seven checks consciously and the surface of your writing changes.
Writing as a Tool
One last point needs making. Writing is no longer mere self-expression; it has become a tool of business and work.
The column a solo entrepreneur writes, the book introduction a publisher writes, the report a planner writes—each one is the medium that carries their work to the outside world. When the writing smells like AI, the work behind it looks lighter, too. When the writing carries the writer's own breath, the work lands with more weight.
The faster AI can produce text, the sharper the difference human writing makes. Use the tools as tools—but never skip the final pass where you reshape the draft in your own breath. That is the single most important thing about writing in the AI era.
Reread your own writing. Count how many of the eight patterns above appear in it. Then smooth each one out, once. Even when the same information sits in the same format, whether your own breath lives inside it decides the fate of the piece.
Good writing isn't hard. It just has to be conscious. One deliberate pass—knowing what you are writing and how you are writing it—lifts a piece two levels.
The faster the tools become, the brighter the spots touched by a human hand. How you leave those marks in your own writing is the central question of writing in the AI age.
