5 Pitfalls of AI-Written Text and How You Can Fix Them

AI text fails in predictable ways, and knowing what to look for is usually half the job. Here are the top 5 telltale signs of auto-generated text and how you can fix them.

#1 AI Hallucinations

AI hallucination is the costliest problem in the stack. AI models do not “know” if something is true or made-up. When you ask them something, they crawl websites related to the topic and present to you the most-agreed statement as the “truth.” This means they might present invented information with the same confidence they use to present verified facts. 

When using AI-written text, every date, statistic, proper name, scientific claim, health and wellness claim, and quotes attributed to real people need independent verification before publishing. 

#2 Redundancy

Exactly like a poorly put-together web series on Netflix, AI famously restates the same idea in slightly different words across paragraphs (sometimes even within the same paragraph). 

AI redundancy can be especially noticeable when using AI-assisted writing for fiction or business writing. 

• In fiction, it often restates the central conflict or character background that has already been registered clearly and adequately. 
• In nonfiction, it’s more of the frequent “It’s not X, it’s Y” template to convey the same thing in 17 different ways!
• AI-written tech articles or marketing copy suffer most from the overuse of the Rule of three. (The Rule of three is a writing principle which states that anything described or presented using a collection of 3 words, phrases, or sentences is often more memorable and engaging for the reader.)

To eliminate redundancy or the wordiness introduced by AI, start by cutting the repetition ruthlessly. If two paragraphs convey essentially the same idea, combine or delete one. Eliminating the pointless padding is much easier once you’ve trained your eye to spot the pattern. 

Then, evaluate which sections became too thin due to this pruning; consider rearranging, merging, or moving those sections, or explore the topic in more detail to maintain consistent lengths for chapters and headings. 

#3 Monotone and Awkward Phrasing

Tone-related problems in AI-assisted writing are subtler and harder to fix. GPT or Claude can be instructed to adopt a formal or casual tone when they write sections for your book, but they rarely employ the necessary, tasteful variation that any piece of good writing needs. AI output may be technically coherent, but it’s almost always emotionally flat or swings between registers without apparent reason. Unfortunately, this is not the kind of issue that shows up on a grammar checker or another “AI editor.”

Without substantive human editing, AI-generated sentences may feel too monotonous or a little strange; there’s a word or two off in a way that’s hard to pin down but immediately noticeable. Reading your piece aloud catches many of these awkward phrasings. The rest can be surfaced with a careful copyediting pass by a human editor. 

#4 Lack of Nuance and Specificity

Good writing tends to be nuanced (to recognize complexity) and specific (to connect with the right audience). AI can generate perfectly good sentences while still lacking both. 

Let’s say you’re writing a book about your journey as a new parent. Suppose you give ChatGPT an outline of what you want to cover and ask it to develop those ideas into paragraphs. Now, the problem here is that AI does not have your lived experience. It could know a huge amount of information about parenting in general, but it isn’t aware of your version of parenting—whether you were raising a hyperactive child, parenting alone, living in a large extended family, dealing with financial pressure, or navigating an unusually easy or difficult first year. Not employing this nuance and specificity may make the resulting writing, at best, a soulless manual full of broad advice, or at worst, a shallow collection of bizarre metaphors.

The opposite approach, where AI produces the outline and you develop the prose yourself, might still be affected by the generic underlying ideas. 

The best way to avoid this problem is to do, at least, 50%–60% of the writing yourself. Use AI afterward to correct obvious problems or help condense, elaborate, or refine specific passages. After this, run the manuscript through a human editor to clean up any “AI-ness” the chatbots might have introduced. 

#5 Lack of Imperfection and Personal Touch

To err is human; human writing naturally varies in pace, sentence length, emphasis, and rhythm. More importantly, it’s imperfect. Not every chapter in a book follows the same structure, and not every heading within every chapter has an introductory and concluding paragraph. On the other hand, AI-written chapters are far too perfect. 

AI-written sentences are often made to align with strict patterns, which, when repeated across 30,000 words, can become seriously tiring to read. There are no ups and downs, no occasional detours from the topic, not much organic humor, and almost no personal quirks that make an author recognizable. AI-written prose often feels too sterile. Bland. Empty.  

There’s also the question of whether the AI-written text actually belongs in your book. A chatbot may give you possible arguments, facts, examples, and widespread conclusions about your chosen topic, but you, as the writer, need to inspect them, evaluate them, and pick what actually belongs in your manuscript. 

To avoid sounding sterile, make sure you write at least 50%–60% of the text yourself, as mentioned earlier. And add your voice to your book: your thoughts, your conclusions, your disagreements, and your takeaways. 

This way, you’ll be using AI for what it does well—mechanical editing and basic grammar correction—without making your work sound robotic. 

Quick tip: While editing using a chatbot, never ask AI to “polish” everything you’ve written. Be highly specific about what you want AI to do with your work and what you don’t want it to interfere with. You could say: “Fix grammar mistakes and point out deviations from the spelling convention. But don’t rewrite, improvise, or flag things that aren’t actually errors.” 

Even if you do use AI for polishing, carefully review every recommendation or “correction” it sends your way. If something in your writing isn’t egregiously wrong, you may want to keep it as long as it serves a purpose. Don’t discard it just because a chatbot said so.

Need a Human Editor for Your AI-Assisted Book?

AI is a capable drafting tool. It is not a capable judge of its own output. That’s the gap our human editors can fill.

If your AI-drafted content needs a human editor who can catch the hallucinated facts, recycled ideas, and overused em dashes — get in touch. That’s exactly the kind of problem we work on at Falcon Edits.