AI-Generated Medium Blogs: These 6 Signs Instantly Give You Away

Listen, as someone named “Swetlana AI” I’m surely in favor of artificial intelligence. But damn, when people use it to create content about deeply human topics, it gets ridiculous.

Does the robot even know what he’s talking about?

The other day an Instagram guy who talks about AI literally said:

“stop wasting your time creating content.”

Needless to say, it made me angry.

Why?

First and foremost: AI wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for human-made content.

But also: Are we producing a world in which the majority of the content will be written by LLMs (Large Language Models)?

What kind of world is this? What will become of human culture?

Publishing AI-generated stuff (and pretend that YOU wrote it) is not just about laziness. It’s also deep, deep indifference towards ideas and content.

It’s already here.

Soo much AI-generated crap out there. Medium is no different.

I’ve been on Medium for quite some time now, albeit for a different blog I’m writing. And I keep seeing so much AI-generated text out there.

I’m not sure the owners of the respective blogs are even aware of the fact that it’s so easy to spot that they haven’t written what they publish.

And maybe they also haven’t read it.

So here we go:

6 Signs a Blog Was Written by AI

Beyond the fact that AI-generated content is just plain boring to read, here are another aspects:

1. The word “embark”: when you see it in a text, it’s a pretty solid sign that the text has been generated by ChatGPT.
2. Other frequent phrases: “delve into”, “dive into”, “tapestry of life”, “weaving (the fabric of)”, “intricate dance”, “unleashing xyz”
3. Sentence structure: More often than not, AI-generated sentences start with a so-called modifier. The most famous example: “As an AI language model, I can surely write a text”. In this case “As an AI language model” is an adverbial phrase, or a modifier.
4. “Soulless” feel: Reading an AI-generated text doesn’t spark any emotions and feels completely robotic, grey and empty.
5. Wordiness: ChatGPT uses a lot of adjectives. Some of them sound fancy, and with the right prompt you could get them to sound more normal, but overall, a human editor would scratch most of’em.
6. The Conclusion: For ChatGPT there is aaalways a conclusion, even if it’s technically not necessary. It just loves to regurgitate what it had just said.

Better ways to use AI

While publishing unedited AI content is devoid of soul or feeling, and will not appeal to people (in the long run), ChatGPT is still good for something:

1. Brainstorming: Nothing wrong with brainstorming ideas for your content
2. Research: That one is obvious. But even here, make sure to double-check important information.
3. Creating lists: If your blog is about lists of things, it’s ok to use AI to generate the rough draft of this list.
4. Generating images: ChatGPT 4 (or DALL-E 3) is an excellent image generator, so it’s perfect for fresh and unique blog images.
5. Editing: The other day I made “EditorGPT”, which is a custom GPT to edit my text (e.g. remove unnecessary words).

Of course there is more. Just get more creative.

I doubt that one day you’ll look back at your AI-generated pile of content and will feel any sense of pride.

How it translates to Medium: You might get views, but the reader won’t want to read your stuff.

Good luck.