(Yes, this was written by Claude)
AI writing is room temperature mediocrity
AI writing sucks. There, I said it. It reads like someone polished every edge off a perfectly fine thought until what’s left is a smooth, beige pebble of a sentence. No grit, no surprise, no point of view. Room temperature mediocrity. You can feel your eyes start to skim by the second paragraph because nothing is asking you to actually be there.
The tell is everywhere once you see it. The triplet lists. The “it’s not just X, it’s Y” cadence. The em dashes doing the work three commas would do better. The little wrap-up sentence at the end of every section reassuring you that what you just read was, in fact, what you just read. It’s the writing equivalent of an open floor plan in a new build apartment — technically fine, completely forgettable.
How to fix it when you’re writing with AI
- Write the bones yourself first. Even a messy paragraph of your own gives the model something to imitate. Start with the model and you’ll end up sounding like the model.
- Cut every sentence that sounds like a conclusion. AI loves to summarize what it just said. Delete those. The reader was there.
- Keep one weird thing per paragraph. A specific detail, an opinion, a joke, a stupid metaphor about a beige pebble. AI sands those off; put them back.
- Read it out loud. If you wouldn’t say it to a friend at a bar, it shouldn’t be in the post. AI fails this test constantly.
- Kill the hedges. “It’s worth noting,” “in many ways,” “arguably,” “ultimately.” Strike them all. The model adds them for safety; they cost you a voice.
- Pick a take. AI writing is allergic to commitment. Decide what you actually think and let the post lean that way, hard.
- Vary the sentence length. Models default to a medium-length rhythm. Throw in a short one. Then write a longer one that actually goes somewhere and earns its commas before stopping.
If Claude is writing solo
- Give it a voice to copy — paste in two or three of your own paragraphs and tell it to match the rhythm, not just the topic.
- Ask for a draft, then ask it to delete 40% of the words. The second pass is almost always better than the first.
- Forbid the moves: no em dashes, no triplet lists, no “not just X but Y,” no closing summary sentence. Watch what’s left.
- Make it commit. “What do you actually think?” forces a stance instead of a survey.
- Treat the output as a first draft, not a final one. The model’s job is to get you to a starting line, not a finish line.
The goal isn’t to hide that AI was involved. The goal is to make it sound like a person was awake the whole time.