Two Senior Leaders in the last month told me they are thinking about limiting AI at work because people keep sending them output they clearly never read. I get the frustration. Penalizing people for using AI when the offense is skipping the cleanup and the fact check is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. AI is a fact of life, and banning it puts you at a disadvantage against every competitor who did not. That said, irresponsible use without guardrails is arguably worse.
I often say I treat AI like an overzealous intern who thinks he knows everything but is inexhaustibly available to make changes. I have never fired an intern for a bad first draft. I told him what a finished one looks like, and I told him I’d be checking.
So the adaptation senior leaders need to make is the same one. Set the expectations for AI output and then hold people to them. In my own use that means five to ten iterations before anything is dialed in, a source for any claim I did not put in myself, and a rewrite of most of it so it reads like me and not like the machine. That last part is where the tells matter, because they are what a reader now uses to decide whether to trust you.
The tells, from the list I keep for my own writing:
Structure
Sections that open by announcing themselves (”When it comes to pricing...”) and close with a summary line restating what you just read.
Lists padded to three or five items. Triads show up everywhere: “clear, concise, and compelling.”
Headers, bold, and bullets on content that should be two paragraphs.
Symmetry. Every section gets the same depth whether it matters or not.
Sentence fragments for drama, used more than once a piece. “Every. Single. Time.”
Sentence patterns
Contrast framing: “It’s not just X, it’s Y.”
Payoff lines at the end of a paragraph that restate the point as a slogan.
Rhetorical-question pivots: “So what does this mean for your team?”
Throat clearing before the point: “It’s worth noting,” “It’s important to remember,” “Let’s dive in.”
Parallel openers in a run: “It’s about trust. It’s about speed. It’s about people.”
Transition stacks: moreover, furthermore, additionally, ultimately.
Em-dashes all over the place, often two or three per paragraph.
Hedges stacked on hedges: “can potentially help,” “may often.”
Vocabulary
The usual word list: delve, robust, seamless, leverage, elevate, unlock, landscape, tapestry, testament, pivotal, crucial, realm, foster, navigate, “in today’s fast-paced world.”
Intensifiers that add nothing: truly, genuinely, incredibly, very, really.
Abstract nouns where a specific one belongs: “drive meaningful outcomes” instead of “cut CAC 22%.”
Content
No specifics. No names, numbers, dates, or firsthand details, and no claim the writer could be wrong about.
No position. Both sides get presented and nothing is committed to.
Confident claims with no source, or sources that don’t exist.
Fabricated precision. A statistic with no source, usually a suspiciously specific one like 73 percent.
The analogy that arrives from nowhere. “Think of it like a symphony,” on a piece about pipeline.
Nothing only this writer could know. Swap in another company’s name and the piece still works.
Tone
Relentless positivity and an eager, helpful register. It opens by praising the question (”Great question!”) and closes with a menu of offers.
The “whether you’re a founder or a Fortune 500 CMO” opener that addresses everyone and therefore nobody, and the “What’s your take?” close that begs for engagement.
The emotional temperature never changes, including on topics where a human would get annoyed or funny.
Mechanical giveaways
Leftover prompt residue, like “Certainly! Here’s a LinkedIn post...” or “[Insert name].”
Curly quotes and apostrophes mixed with straight ones, a sign the text was pasted from somewhere else.
Title Case Headers on content that doesn’t need headers.
If your team’s work has more than a few of these, you have an expectations problem. It’s just interns being interns.
I ran this through an AI detector and it did not love the list. Fair enough, it was written with one:)