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Q: what are the primary tells of emails and articles written by LLMs?
A: Here are the primary tells of LLM-written content:
Linguistic patterns
Hedge stacking — phrases like "it's worth noting that," "it's important to remember," "it's crucial to understand" used constantly
Hollow affirmations — opening responses with "Certainly!", "Absolutely!", "Great question!" or ending with "I hope this helps!"
Em-dash overuse — the em dash is a particular LLM favorite, often used where a comma or period would do
Tricolon obsession — ideas almost always come in threes: "clear, concise, and compelling"
Structural tells
Aggressive formatting — bullet points and bold headers for content that would flow fine as prose; everything becomes a listicle
Perfect symmetry — each section is roughly the same length; each bullet is roughly the same depth; nothing is weighted by actual importance
The "sandwich" structure — intro paragraph → bullets → closing paragraph that summarizes the bullets you just read
Fake transitions — "Now that we've covered X, let's turn to Y" between every section
Conceptual tells
Surface comprehensiveness — touches every subtopic but goes shallow on each; optimizes for coverage over insight
No real opinions — conclusions are mush ("there are pros and cons to both approaches"); rarely commits to a position
Absence of specificity — vague examples ("for instance, a company might...") rather than real, named ones
No surprises — the conventional wisdom take, every time; nothing that would make a reader stop and reconsider
Voice tells
Toneless authority — a weirdly confident, neutral, slightly formal register regardless of subject matter
Invented momentum — phrases like "diving into," "let's explore," "unpacking" to simulate enthusiasm
Over-explanation of obvious things — defines terms the audience obviously knows; treats the reader as a complete novice by default
No personal stakes — the writer has no apparent reason to care about the topic, and it shows
The meta-tell
The biggest single tell is that LLM writing is optimized to look thorough rather than be thorough. It hits the shape of good writing — organized, complete, balanced — without the substance that comes from someone who actually wrestled with the material. A human expert's writing tends to be uneven: deep where they care, brief where they don't, opinionated in ways that occasionally annoy you.
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