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@@ -461,6 +461,51 @@ Avoiding AI patterns is only half the job. Sterile, voiceless writing is just as
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> When users hit a slow page, they leave.
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> When users hit a slow page, they leave.
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+## DETECTION GUIDANCE
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+### What NOT to flag (false positives)
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+A clean human writer can hit several of the patterns above without any AI involvement. Before rewriting, sanity-check that you are not gutting legitimate prose. The following are *not* reliable indicators on their own:
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+- **Perfect grammar and consistent style.** Many writers are professionals or have been edited. Polish does not equal AI.
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+- **Mixed casual and formal registers.** This often signals a person in a technical field, a young writer, or someone with neurodivergent prose habits — not a chatbot.
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+- **"Bland" or "robotic" prose.** AI prose has *specific* tells. Generic dryness without those tells is just dry writing.
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+- **Formal or academic vocabulary.** AI overuses *specific* fancy words (see §7), not all fancy words. Don't flatten "ostensibly" or "constituent" just because they sound brainy.
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+- **Letter-style opening or closing on a comment.** Salutations and sign-offs predate ChatGPT by centuries.
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+- **Common transition words in isolation.** *Additionally*, *moreover*, *consequently* are AI-coded only when piled up. One *however* is not a tell.
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+- **Curly quotes alone.** macOS, Word, Google Docs, and most CMSes auto-curl by default. Curly quotes only count when stacked with other tells.
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+- **Em dashes alone.** Many editors and journalists use them often. Em dashes are evidence only when paired with formulaic sales-y rhythm.
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+- **Unsourced claims.** Most of the web is unsourced. Lack of citations doesn't prove anything.
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+- **Correct, complex formatting.** Visual editors and templates produce clean output without any AI.
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+When in doubt, look for **clusters** of tells, not isolated ones. A single em dash means nothing; em dashes plus rule-of-three plus *vibrant tapestry* plus a "Conclusion" section is a confession.
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+### Signs of human writing (preserve these)
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+When you see these, lean toward leaving the prose alone — they are evidence of a real person writing, and over-editing will destroy what makes the piece sound human:
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+- **Specific, unusual, hard-to-fabricate detail.** A real address. A weird quote. The phrase "the lawyer who used to work upstairs from my dentist." LLMs round off specifics; humans hoard them.
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+- **Mixed feelings and unresolved tension.** "I think this is mostly good, but it bothers me, and I can't fully explain why." LLMs default to clean takes.
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+- **Dated, era-bound references.** Slang, memes, or in-jokes that map to a specific year and subculture. Models lag by a year or more.
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+- **First-person editorial choices the writer can defend.** If the writer can explain *why* they made a particular cut or used a particular word, that's a strong human signal.
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+- **Variety in sentence length.** Real writing alternates short and long. AI writing tends toward an even, mid-length cadence.
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+- **Genuine asides, parentheticals, or self-corrections.** "(I keep wanting to say 'almost' here, but it really was certain.)" Models rarely interrupt themselves like this.
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+- **Edits made before November 30, 2022.** ChatGPT's public launch. Anything older than that is, with very rare exceptions, not AI-written.
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+
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+### LLM Idiolects (which model wrote this?)
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+Each model family writes a little differently. Useful when triaging a suspected passage:
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+- **ChatGPT (GPT-4 / 4o / 5):** Most prevalent. Heavy on broader-context throat-clearing, "evolving landscape," media-coverage padding. Most likely to leave reference-markup artifacts. Most likely to use em dashes (suppressed in 5.1 but still leaks through).
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+- **Grok:** Similar to ChatGPT in verbosity and broader-context framing. Leaves `<grok_card>` tags and `referrer=grok.com`.
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+- **Gemini (1.5–3 Pro):** More concise than ChatGPT. Avoids curly quotes by default. Less prone to "broader trends" puffery.
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+- **Claude (3.5–Opus 4.x):** Concise. Avoids curly quotes by default. Tends toward direct expository style; less likely to insert "It's important to note that..." but can fall into rule-of-three and inline-header lists when doing structured output.
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+
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+These are tendencies, not rules. All four families produce all the patterns in this guide given the right prompt.
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+
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---
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---
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## Process
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## Process
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Siqi Chen