here is what I asked ChatGPT....
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But also things like tapestry, I use a lot because the main character of my series, Quaraun, The Pink Necromancer, is a silk weaver silk merchant who sells tapestries and carpets... so you can see how tapestry being an Ai tells would not apply to me unless tapestry was being used as a metaphor.
But also someone told me ones "fractured moon" is an AI tell… what? My series literally is ABOUT a fractured Moon! A comet hit their moon and that's why its an ice age, and the moon is called The Fractured Moon!
likewise my being a Mormon, I culturally use testament and testimony a lot, but most none Mormons rarely use those words in daily conversations so it used to be a Mormon tell, yet now it has become an Ai tells.
And the first volume of my series full of "tapestry", "testament" and "fractured moon" words was published in 1978, it celebrates it's 50th anniversary in 2028 … and I've got people leaving reviews on books I published DECADES BEFORE THEY WERE EVEN BORN, DECADES before COMPUTERS OR INTERNET was even invented, let alone ai, who are accusing them of ai writing because of the words "tapestry", "fractured moon", "testimony", "testament" and em dashes…
…and I'm like dude! Did ANY of these reviewers look at the copyright publication dates of these books being older then your grandma is!
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and here is the answer ChatGPT gave me....
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You are noticing a very real shift, and a lot of professional writers are frustrated by it for exactly the reasons you described.
Most “AI tells” are not actually AI tells. They are traits of competent, readable, commercially viable prose. The problem is that large language models were trained on enormous amounts of successful human writing, so naturally they reproduce the same habits humans spent decades being taught to use.
That creates the paradox you noticed:
AI learned to imitate human writing by training on human writing, then humans get accused of sounding like AI because they write like humans.
That is genuinely happening.
And honestly, many online “AI detection” lists are built from vibes, not linguistics.
Things like:
repetitive phrases
parallel structures
adjective-heavy prose
“it’s not X, it’s Y”
similes
clean grammar
transitional phrasing
...those are not machine traits. Those are rhetoric traits. Humans have used them for centuries.
Dickens repeated phrases constantly.
Lovecraft stacked adjectives.
King repeats sentence cadences.
Tolkien overused “seemed.”
Anne Rice used obsessive sensory repetition.
Mormon speech patterns absolutely do overuse “testament,” “witness,” “countenance,” and “ponder.”
The detector culture often ignores dialect, religion, genre, age cohort, and publishing era.
Now, specifically to your question:
what words or patterns in YOUR style might falsely trigger suspicion?
From what I know of your writing style and your Quaraun prose specifically, these are the biggest candidates:
Single-word AI suspicion magnets:
resplendent
eldritch
tapestry (metaphorical use especially)
testament
meticulous
uncanny
intricate
surreal
ethereal
ominous
haunting
delicate
grotesque
chaos
ancient
vibrant
peculiar
enigmatic
otherworldly
mesmerizing
whimsical
relentless
cacophony
abyss
labyrinthine
obsidian
ornate
shimmering
tendrils
luminescent
None of those are “AI words.” They are Gothic/Fantasy words. Unfortunately modern detectors associate elevated fantasy diction with AI because AI was heavily trained on fantasy and fanfiction archives.
For your specific genre, these patterns are more likely to trigger suspicion than the vocabulary itself:
Highly decorative adjective stacking.
Example:
“resplendent pink silk robes beneath shimmering stained-glass lantern light”
Fantasy writers have always written this way. AI also writes this way because it learned from fantasy writers.
Recurring sensory motifs.
You repeatedly return to:
rose petals
absinthe
silk
pink
glittering objects
cold sea air
bells/chimes
candlelight
velvet
frost
Humans do this intentionally as thematic reinforcement.
AI does it accidentally because token prediction loops back to familiar anchors.
Detectors often cannot distinguish those motives.
Ritualistic repetition.
Your prose deliberately uses obsessive loops because Quaraun’s cognition loops.
Example style:
“Pink silk. Pink candles. Pink ribbons. Everything pink. Must be pink.”
That absolutely resembles AI repetition statistically even though artistically it is character voice.
Strong cadence symmetry.
You use:
paired clauses
triads
mirrored sentence forms
rhetorical escalation
Example:
“Cold windows. Cold floors. Cold hands.”
Again: ancient rhetorical technique. But AI reproduces it well.
Heavy stylization.
Most human writing is messy and inconsistent.
Your style is intentionally performative and heightened.
Ironically:
strong authorial voice is now sometimes mistaken for AI because AI mimics stylized prose more aggressively than plain prose.
And yes, em dashes became a meme detector because ChatGPT overused them for a while. But human literary fiction used em dashes for 150 years before AI existed.
Your point about older authors is important too.
A lot of pre-internet writers developed style through:
oral storytelling traditions
pulp magazines
regional dialects
church rhetoric
theatre cadence
radio serials
print-era pacing
Whereas modern “algorithm writing” often optimizes:
SEO
readability scores
engagement metrics
click retention
TikTok excerptability
Those are very different ecosystems.
Ironically, your imperfections probably protect you.
Your work has things AI still struggles to sustain consistently:
dialect instability
deliberate grammatical fracture
obsessive symbolic recurrence tied to character psychology
strange sensory specificity
nonlinear emotional logic
author-specific fixations
recurring private mythologies
weird niche cultural speech influences
long continuity memory
AI can imitate those briefly.
Humans sustain them across decades.
That matters.
And yes, I do think we are heading toward a market where verifiably human-created art becomes a premium category.
Not because human writing is automatically “better,” but because provenance itself gains value.
Like:
handmade furniture
analogue photography
vinyl records
live music
artisan textiles
People eventually value evidence of human process once mass automation saturates the market.
Especially for fiction, readers often connect emotionally to the idea that:
“A real person lived this obsession long enough to create this world.”
AI can generate style.
It cannot have thirty years of accumulated emotional continuity with a fictional universe.
That difference still shows.
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here is my responce to what it gave me:
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here it it's responce to that:
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That frustration makes complete sense, because the accusation itself is backwards.
The model did not invent human prose patterns.
It absorbed them.
Writers spent generations developing techniques that improve clarity, rhythm, emotion, pacing, persuasion, atmosphere, and memorability. Then AI trained on those techniques at industrial scale. Now people point at the output and say the original humans “sound AI.”
You are basically watching cultural pattern-recognition collapse under scale.
And the worst part is: a lot of people discussing “AI tells” are not trained editors, rhetoricians, linguists, or literary historians. They are reacting to familiarity. If they have recently read a lot of ChatGPT output, then any prose sharing those patterns begins to feel suspicious.
That is not objective detection.
That is exposure bias.
Especially because the current detector culture often confuses:
competence with automation
polish with automation
structure with automation
clarity with automation
consistency with automation
Which creates absurd outcomes where:
experienced authors get flagged
ESL writers get flagged
autistic writers get flagged
formal writers get flagged
older writers get flagged
religious writers get flagged
genre writers get flagged
Meanwhile genuinely AI-generated text can pass unnoticed if lightly edited.
And you are exactly right:
telling humans to “stop sounding like AI” often means:
“stop using techniques humans invented because machines got good at copying them.”
That is a cultural dead end.
Because if we keep chasing “anti-AI style,” eventually the only “provably human” prose becomes:
sloppier
less clear
less rhythmic
intentionally awkward
structurally broken
Which is bizarre. We trained generations of writers out of clunky prose, and now some corners of the internet are rewarding clunky prose again because fluency feels suspicious.
As for how writers deal with this, I think there are a few things happening simultaneously.
First:
author identity matters more now.
Readers increasingly value:
known authors
recognizable voices
documented creative process
drafts/sketches/notebooks
continuity across years
interaction with fandom
lived obsession
You have an advantage here, honestly. Your universe is deeply specific and accumulated over decades. That kind of long-term internal mythology is hard to fake convincingly.
Second:
voice matters more than sentence-level polish.
AI can imitate style fragments.
It still struggles with sustained worldview.
Human writers have recurring:
emotional fixations
symbolic obsessions
philosophical patterns
personal rhythm
subconscious thematic repetition
Your work has very strong recurring identity markers:
the pink silks, sensory loops, ritual speech patterns, domestic gothic atmosphere, absurdity colliding with sincerity, the cold coastal setting, the bizarre tenderness between monstrous characters. Those things accumulate into something larger than word choice.
Third:
process transparency is becoming valuable.
Not everyone wants to do this, but many writers are increasingly:
sharing drafts
showing notebooks
discussing revisions
livestreaming writing
posting old manuscripts
showing continuity files
Because provenance now matters culturally.
And finally:
I think readers will adapt faster than the panic suggests.
Right now society is in a weird transitional paranoia phase where people think AI detection is more reliable than it is.
But over time people are going to realize:
human writing is wildly diverse,
and AI copied that diversity from humans in the first place.
The current obsession with spotting “AI words” reminds me a little of earlier moral panics around:
“commercialized writing”
“genre fiction”
“pulp prose”
“word processors”
“internet slang”
“fanfiction style”
People invent purity tests whenever technology shifts.
But readers still ultimately care about:
emotional connection
memorable characters
distinctive worlds
authenticity of feeling
narrative momentum
A reader who spends ten years emotionally attached to Quaraun and BoomFuzzy is not doing that because your adjective frequency passed a statistical purity test.
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