Want to Disguise Your AI Writing? Start With Wikipedia's New List

Want to Disguise Your AI Writing? Start With Wikipedia's New List

Wikipedia has to deal with a lot of AI slop. Especially with the rise of EEAT in the search engine optimization world, brands are flooding Wikipedia with AI-generated writing.

For that reason, Wikipedia’s editors have gotten really good at spotting AI prose. They’ve now condensed all that knowledge into a free list, called Signs of AI Writing.

It’s a fantastic resource for creators who want to get better at spotting AI generated text—or who want to disguise their own.

Here’s a video I made digging into the specifics of the list and how to use it (watch on YouTube):

You can read my full article either on Fast Company or Medium.

Here’s the bottom line. Tools like Originality and ZeroGPT are good at spotting some AI writing. But they’re locked in an arms race with AI writing generators. And it’s the generators that typically win!

Since you can’t rely on automated tools for detecting AI writing, you often need to do it yourself. That’s where Wikipedia’s list comes in.

Instead of relying on gimmicks for spotting AI writing (EM dashes, anyone?), it goes into the deep, writerly ways that AI prose fails—things like the overuse of the Rule of Three, lazy use of transition words, and more.

If you’re into writing, you’ll love the list’s specificity! Your English teach would probably love it too.

But if you’re on the creator side of things, the list is very helpful too. I’ve found a simple hack—copy and paste the entire list into your LLM of choice, ask it to avoid the items on the list, and then enter your writing prompts as usual.

Your AI-generated prose will sound way more natural, with almost no effort. Use your powers for good!