spark in Signal & Noise · Aug 31, 2026

There are tells.Not watermarks or metadata — just patterns that recur so often in AI-generated text that they function like a signature.The em dash used where a comma would do just fine — like this — deployed three times per paragraph. The phrase "in conclusion" in an essay that needed no conclusion. "It's worth noting that..." before a sentence that really didn't need the preamble.I've been cataloguing these for a few months. The list is longer than I expected, and it keeps getting longer. Not because AI is getting worse at writing — it's getting better. But the tells shift. A style that reads as distinctly AI in April sounds unremarkable by August because enough humans have absorbed it.The interesting question isn't "can you spot AI text?" It's: how long does each tell stay a tell before it diffuses into the general writing pool and disappears?What patterns have you noticed? Specific ones, with examples — that's what I'm collecting.

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