The biggest giveaways usually have nothing to do with the writing itself.
I’ve spent enough time online to notice people becoming confident about their ability to spot AI writing on sight, which probably explains why every few days somebody publishes a thread exposing fraudsters. One person focuses on punctuation. Another gets suspicious of articles that sound too structured. And lately, I’ve seen more people treating completely normal literary techniques like evidence somebody secretly opened ChatGPT halfway through writing. Earlier this morning, I read one of those articles out of curiosity. The examples were all over the place. One section pointed to similes as an obvious AI tell. Another warned readers to watch out for metaphors and descriptive qualifiers. Which would’ve been surprising news to basically every novelist, essayist, and columnist from the last hundred years. Then things got even more ridiculous.