An editor's guide to spotting AI writing - CapX
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An editor’s guide to spotting AI writing
Many believe that robot prose is impossible to distinguish from human writing. This is not true
The AI industrial revolution will transform society for the better, but we must not let it replace our humanity
If you want to spot writing by a robot then the best thing to do is to read real authors – and read CapX
Alys Denby<br>12 August 2026
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How do you know this wasn’t written by an AI? If you’re reading CapX, you are presumably interested in free speech, critical thinking and originality. So you should care that what you’re reading was written by a person with a mind.<br>But public life is becoming colonised with ‘copy’ generated by AI. It’s become so commonplace that a journalist at Marie Claire didn’t even bother to remove AI edits from a published article. A Canadian MP revealed that a chatbot had helpfully made his oratory ‘read more like a legislative speech’ by reading the prompt aloud in parliament.<br>I do not publish AI-generated content for the very simple reason that if no one has been bothered to work on it no one should be expected to read it
As an editor I receive op-ed submissions every day from reputable PR agencies, campaigners, law firms, blue chip companies and even writers that have been generated by AI. I do not publish this content for the very simple reason that if no one has been bothered to work on it no one should be expected to read it. I don’t claim to be a writer of genius, but I have spent my entire career polishing other people’s words. I think I’ve become pretty attuned to what reads well and what doesn’t.<br>But not everyone has that professional advantage. And the sheer volume of this stuff indicates that too many believe that AI is impossible to distinguish from human writing. This is not true.<br>If the supply of ideas is becoming near infinite thanks to AI, we are in a buyers’ market. Consumers can afford to – and must – be discerning. So here’s a few ways to tell if you’re reading a robot based on real op-eds that I have rejected.<br>Rhythm<br>AI loves short sentences. Four-word sentences are great – I wrote one just now. But AI over-uses them. If there are two four-word sentences in a row that is an unlikely coincidence. Multiple paragraphs in the same piece with the exact same sentence lengths are strong indicators of AI.<br>Here’s an example from a recent submission I rejected: ‘Because here’s what I believe: in moments like this, when the old certainties wobble, creativity isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity. Imagination is how we rebuild.’ Ironically, given the subject matter, no one with an imagination would write this formulaically.<br>Rhythm is difficult to codify but you can hear it as you read. I could tell this submission was AI just from the paragraph lengths, which are so clearly unnatural.<br>By contrast, these are the paragraph lengths of the last column the late Rod Liddle wrote for The Spectator:<br>Human beings need more than a sentence to finish a thought. If in doubt, read it aloud and ask if it sounds like normal human speech.<br>Weird constructions<br>Because it relies on aggregation, AI is bad at having original opinions. So it uses a lot of ‘on the one hand on the other’ or ‘not only but also’ constructions. It’s often strangely passive, as in this sentence: ‘The rules and how they’re applied vary from platform to platform, and sometimes the calls made are the wrong ones.’<br>It will also use very similar constructions far too close together. The tricolon is an obvious one. But here’s an example of two similarly ambivalent constructions that occurred just a few paragraphs from each other in a submission that I rejected:<br>Gary Stevenson has correctly identified Britain’s frustration. But frustration is not an economic strategy.
And:<br>Britain doesn’t need a politics of envy. It needs a politics of opportunity.
Good opinion writers are both more emphatic and more uneven than this.<br>Sense<br>AI will repeat and argue against itself. A recent submission that I rejected included: ‘These aren’t simply signs of wealth being unevenly distributed. They’re examples of an economy that has stopped generating enough of it in the first place.’<br>This is not only a telling ‘not just this, but this’ AI construction, it also doesn’t quite hang together. It’s not a real contradiction, even though it is framed as one. And later in the piece the same assertion is repeated almost verbatim: ‘The bigger question is why Britain has become so poor at creating wealth in the first place.’<br>Epistemology<br>I’m sure, as you’ve been reading this, you’ve noticed that my own writing is riddled with the same infelicities of which I’m accusing AI. That’s the point. We are in a co-dependent relationship with the robots. They are parasites on our thoughts but we are increasingly outsourcing thinking to them.<br>Accordingly, I asked the AI how to spot AI. ChatGPT told me that it is too fond of transition...