How to Write Like an AI

Editor's Note: This tongue-in-cheek listicle takes aim at the telltale traits of AI-generated writing: fabricated citations, misplaced confidence, and the occasional overworked em dash. As generative tools become more embedded in how we produce, package, and publish insights, knowing what sets machine-made content apart is suddenly part of the job. Consider this both a laugh and a litmus test: if it feels familiar, you might be starting to sound like a machine.

No doubt you realize how important it is to write like the very model of a modern, major generative AI.

Here are some tips so that you can continue to enjoy writing, while pretending to simply be an editor of generated prose instead:

• Make up citations to sound authoritative. Generative AI knows the best practice is to cite the academic literature (Barnum, 2024, pp. 194-201). But as it only understands which words appear together, without knowing what they mean, the system doesn't actually verify the works that it quotes exist.
• Use the em dash. Yes, of course you were using the em dash before (that’s where generative AI learned it from) but no self-respecting piece can be published today without a properly—or improperly—used em dash.
• Quote facts correctly only 80% of the time. Nothing gives away that a piece was written by professionals like having been fact checked. Don’t worry if you misremembered a survey stat or misunderstood the context of a verbatim response. Just skim material and wing it.
• Mix the abstract and concrete. To a generative AI, which lacks sensory organs, every noun is abstract. So it doesn’t realize that many nouns can be witnessed by humans and are typically grouped with other such nouns. Make it rain cats and doggerel. Juxtapose catcalls and dogs.
• Personify everything. Write that your survey enticed respondents, your interview guide sang elegantly, and your conclusions marched forth. Personify your concepts, even as we’ve personified the AI models.
• Invent details that seem relevant. Consider words that frequently occur together and bring them in, no matter what. For a survey on live music, Claude invented a question about demographic differences by rural vs. urban respondents, despite urbanicity not even being asked in that questionnaire, no doubt because urban is a word common to surveys as well as being a musical genre.
• Link to random external references. Don’t worry, no one clicks such links anyway.

With a little practice, no one will suspect that you’re responsible for every word you publish. Not even the AI that is summarizing your piece for your busy “reader.”