Six months in the past, you can spot AI-generated textual content by its polished grammar, inflexible essay construction, suspicious fondness for em dashes – and, after all, the inevitable emoji bullets (🔥🚀✨). The true giveaway, no less than to my eye and ear, isn’t the emojis or the punctuation. It’s the cadence.
AI writing has a rhythm drawback. The sentences are clipped. Overly dramatic. Cut up into one-line paragraphs that really feel extra like infomercials than journalism.
“The reality? This wasn’t search engine marketing causation. It was a inventory market correction.”
“They have been left behind. They have been offended. They weren’t your folks.”
On the web page, that is nails-on-chalkboard grating. It doesn’t learn as conversational. It reads as performative. For my part, that is, indubitably, AI’s most recognizable stylistic fingerprint.
A Transient Historical past Of The AI Cadence
This rhythm predates AI. It has been the language of speechwriters, preachers, and copywriters lengthy earlier than GPT entered the chat. Assume Reagan’s addresses, Clinton’s marketing campaign rallies, Obama’s marketing campaign speeches, Churchill’s wartime broadcasts, and Blair’s convention speeches. Every leaned on rhythm and repetition to generate an excessive amount of emotion out of a speck of substance. Pair that with Captain Kirk’s famously staccato supply, televangelists’ sermons, or TED Talks constructed round dramatic pauses, and also you see how cadence could make small or mundane concepts really feel highly effective and deep.
That fashion used to remain in its lane. The place print valued density and readability, speech valued brevity and rhythm. Readers may re-read; listeners couldn’t. Editors enforced writing requirements and kinds and the economics of print rewarded info density over theatrics. Because of this, this cadence lived solely in spoken phrase. It lived in speeches and gross sales copy, and never in essays and articles.
AI collapsed these boundaries. As a result of LLMs can not (or selected to not) differentiate between a stump speech, a YouTube transcript, and a white paper, they overindex patterns designed to steer aloud and repurpose them for the written web page. Now, we’re inundated with technical articles that learn like motivational talks.
Why AIs Default To This Cadence
The AI cadence just isn’t an accident – it’s a mirrored image of what fashions have been most closely skilled on. Massive language fashions have been fed a disproportionate quantity of spoken-word materials: transcripts of speeches, information experiences, debates, interviews, webinars, podcasts, and video scripts. These aren’t “written texts” within the conventional sense; they’re spoken performances transformed into textual content.
Why a lot spoken-word information? As a result of it’s low-cost and plentiful. Again once I was working my ISP, I beloved radio and TV for promoting and information mentions as a result of it was far inexpensive than shopping for or successful house in print. Broadcasters had 24 hours a day to fill, and native stations have been all the time determined for content material. Print, alternatively, is dear. Each web page of a newspaper, journal, or e book prices cash to supply, and publishers restrict content material to what’s vital or reasonably priced. Because of this, much more hours of audio and video have been produced than rigorously edited prose — and far of that materials finally ends up transcribed. These transcripts give the fashions an enormous mountain of “written-down speech” in comparison with a comparatively smaller physique of curated, edited textual content.
The distinction is refined however necessary: a transcript is in a written medium, however it’s not writing in a written fashion. It preserves the cadence of spoken supply — quick bursts, rhetorical pauses, fragments. Fashions overindex this rhythm as a result of it dominates the dataset.
Even when prompted to keep away from it, the fashions can’t resist drifting again into this rhythm. They could handle just a few sentences of various prose, however the gravitational pull of the AI cadence all the time drags them again. It’s now the default groove burned into their coaching.
The Em Sprint Downside
That overindexing additionally explains a associated AI inform: the sudden overuse of em dashes. In polished writing, dashes have been traditionally used sparingly for emphasis or interruption. In speech, nonetheless, pauses are fixed. Transcripts typically mark these pauses with dashes. For a mannequin swimming in transcripts, the sprint turns into a default punctuation mark, as a result of it features because the written equal of a spoken pause. The result’s copy plagued by dashes – not as a result of the concepts require them, however as a result of the coaching information normalized them.
Punctuation As Breath
Punctuation has all the time been about greater than grammar. Intervals, commas, and dashes are indicators for the way we pause and the place we breathe. They’re like rests in music, telling the reader when to cease, inhale, and reset earlier than persevering with. Effectively-edited prose balances these pauses so the rhythm feels pure.
The AI cadence breaks this steadiness. When each thought is chopped into fragments, you’re successfully informed to breathe after each line. Studying an article like this appears like hyperventilating: shallow breaths, fixed interruptions, no sustained circulation. It makes every little thing sound catastrophic, pressing, or world-shattering, even when the subject material is mundane. Light readers, not each sentence or each concept warrants that degree of drama.
The place this leaves us is that when fashions generate textual content, they parrot again the constructions they’ve seen most frequently: speech rhythms and speech punctuation, offered as if they have been the usual for written communication. They don’t seem to be. They’re salesmanship with line breaks and pauses dressed up as prose.
Why Readers React To It
This cadence feels highly effective at first. It mimics pure speech. It creates rhythm. It feels dramatic with out requiring depth. That’s why it pops in feeds.
Nonetheless, the longer it’s stretched out, like in long-form content material, or the extra a reader is uncovered to the identical cadence over and over and over, the facility you as soon as felt collapses into disdain. This breathy, short-sentence supply results in:
- Oversimplification which flattens nuance.
- Repetition that manipulates greater than it informs.
- Each line to demand consideration making certain none of them earn it.
- Readers to suspect fashion is substituting for substance.
Right here is the deeper drawback: when every little thing is delivered as if it have been earth-shattering, readers start to doubt the authenticity of the message itself. It’s Syndrome’s speculation in The Incredibles: “When everyone seems to be tremendous, nobody is.” If each sentence screams urgency, then nothing really carries weight.
Traditionally, this sort of relentless, crisis-driven cadence has additionally been a manipulation tactic. Political demagogues, televangelists, and snake-oil salesmen leaned on hyperbole exactly as a result of they lacked proof. When AI reproduces that very same rhythm on the web page, it inherits the credibility drawback too. Readers might not articulate it consciously, however they really feel it: if it’s important to shout each line, possibly you don’t have sufficient substance to face on quietly.
Simply as key phrase stuffing as soon as turned a trademark of low-quality search engine marketing, this cadence is already changing into the hallmark of low-quality AI. Readers acknowledge the rhythm earlier than they take in the message. When the medium distracts from the message, belief erodes.
A Story Of Two Paragraphs
AI cadence in apply:
“The algorithm modified.
Websites misplaced visitors.
Panic unfold.
And the business?
It declared search engine marketing lifeless – once more.”
Now, the identical concept written for readers:
“When the algorithm modified, many websites noticed a drop in visitors. The panic was predictable. Inside days, acquainted headlines declared search engine marketing lifeless as soon as once more. The cycle repeats each few years, and each few years it proves improper.”
The distinction right here is apparent: one is an infomercial and the opposite is writing.
How To Spot It
Editors and readers can prepare themselves to note:
- Lengthy runs of one-sentence paragraphs.
- Rhetorical questions with no depth (typically starting with conjunctions like And or However…
- Sentence fragments pretending to be profound.
- Sermon-like pacing that appears to anticipate a refrain of ‘amens’ (or applause, for those who’re fortunate)…
Merely put, after getting seen it, you can’t unsee it: it’s the literary equal of amusing observe.
How To Write Like A Human Once more
How will we treatment this example? In need of, I suppose, doing our personal writing?
- Fluctuate sentence size as a substitute of defaulting to extremes.
- Use rhetorical questions sparingly – solely after they genuinely add depth.
- Group associated concepts into paragraphs; readers can deal with multiple sentence at a time. Until you’re writing FOR toddlers, don’t deal with your readers as if they ARE toddlers.
- Prioritize readability and voice over performative drama. Word right here that the objective isn’t to sound informal in any respect prices, however to sound intentional, rational, and backed by information.
Why It Issues For SEOs And Entrepreneurs
AI writing instruments are embedded in practically each workflow. Left unchecked, they are going to flood the net with copy that reads like an limitless gross sales pitch. Professionals should edit not only for details however for voice.
Meaning:
- Coaching groups to acknowledge and break the AI cadence.
- Creating fashion guides that emphasize various sentence and paragraph construction.
- Modifying AI drafts with rhythm in thoughts, not simply key phrases.
- Writing for people who learn – not simply platforms that skim.
Respecting the reader’s time and intelligence is, ultimately, the true optimization.
Is There Ever A Place For This Fashion?
Sure, after all, however like most issues, sparsely. Staccato writing is efficient for:
- Advert copy the place house is restricted.
- Video scripts the place pacing drives consideration. (Your LinkedIn vertical movies and IG Reels? Have at it. That is the place the staccato AI cadence shines.)
- The occasional LinkedIn submit engineered for scanning.
Nonetheless, ought to this turn out to be the default writing fashion for articles, blogs, or essays? Abso-effing-lutely not. It cheapens the content material and undermines credibility.
In Closing
AI has launched extra than simply new instruments. It has additionally normalized sure stylistic tics that don’t belong in most types of writing. Amongst these, the AI cadence drawback is essentially the most recognizable and essentially the most damaging when left unchecked.
Writers, editors, and entrepreneurs have to deal with the presence of AI cadence of their writings the identical method we handled key phrase stuffing a decade in the past: as a significant purple flag. The distinction between human and AI writing isn’t simply factual accuracy. It’s rhythm, intent, and voice.
The true divide isn’t human versus machine. It’s generic versus intentional. Intentional writing that’s structured for readability, rooted in substance, and respectful of the reader will all the time stand out.
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Featured Picture: N Universe/Shutterstock
