What AI Writing Gets Wrong (And How to Spot It)

I use AI every day. Claude helps me outline, draft, pressure-test ideas, and move faster than I could alone. I'm not here to tell you AI is bad.

But I can spot AI writing from the second paragraph. And if I can, your readers can too, even if they can't name what's bothering them. They just know something feels off. A little too smooth. A little too everything.

Here's what to look for.

The em dash problem

This one is almost unfair at this point. AI loves an em dash. The way a nervous writer loves a semicolon. If you open a piece of content and em dashes are showing up every other sentence, a human did not write that. Or if they did, they didn't edit it.

One em dash in a piece? Fine. Three? You've got a draft, not a finished product.

The thesaurus word that sticks out

Good writing has a consistent register. The vocabulary feels like it belongs to one person. AI writing occasionally drops in a word that's technically correct but tonally wrong. "Endeavor" in a sentence full of plain English. "Utilize" when "use" was right there the whole time.

It's the equivalent of wearing a tuxedo jacket with jeans. You notice it immediately. You can't not notice it.

"Excited" and its relatives

AI defaults to performed enthusiasm. We're excited to share. This is a remarkable opportunity. We're thrilled to announce. Real humans writing real things don't write like that, at least not without irony.

If the emotional temperature of a piece feels higher than the situation warrants, that's a tell. Nobody is excited about a policy update. Nobody is thrilled about a deadline reminder. This is especially true in internal communications, where employees have a finely tuned radar for hollow warmth. Write the actual feeling, or don't write a feeling at all.

The structure is too perfect

AI produces beautifully balanced content. Every section roughly the same length. Every paragraph with a clear topic sentence and a tidy close. Three examples, every time. It reads like a content template, because essentially it is.

Real writing is messier. Some sections are longer because the idea needed more room. Some paragraphs are one sentence because that's all it needed. The structure serves the content. Not the other way around.

Nothing is actually said

This is the hardest one to explain and the easiest to feel. AI writing can cover a topic thoroughly without saying anything specific, opinionated, or true about it. It presents information. It rarely takes a position.

Read a piece and ask: what does the writer actually believe here? If you can't find a real answer, you're probably reading something that was generated rather than written. This is where brand voice matters most. A strong voice has a point of view baked in. Without it, there's nothing for AI to replicate, and nothing for readers to connect with.

So what do you do about it?

Use AI. Seriously. It's a legitimate tool and pretending otherwise is a waste of your time. But treat the output as a first draft, not a finished product. The draft is research. Your job is to go in and make it sound like a person with opinions wrote it.

That means cutting the em dashes. Flattening the vocabulary back to your register. Replacing "we're excited to announce" with whatever you actually mean. Breaking the perfect structure where a real thought needs more room. And adding the one thing AI genuinely cannot supply: a point of view.

That's not a small thing. That's the whole thing.

If your brand's content is coming out of the AI pipeline and going straight to publish, it's worth a conversation. Find out how I work, or take a look at what a finished product actually looks like. When you're ready, let's talk.

How to Write a Brand Voice Guide That People Actually Use

Most brands don't have a brand voice guide. The ones that do usually have a PDF that lives in a shared drive nobody opens. Both situations produce the same result: copy that sounds different every time someone new writes it, and a brand that feels vaguely inconsistent without anyone being able to say exactly why.

A good brand voice guide fixes that. But only if it's built right. Here's how to do it.

Start with what you already sound like at your best

The raw material for a real brand voice guide is almost always already out there. Don't start with a blank page. Start with a collection.

Pull the emails your team sends when they're not overthinking it. Find the social post that performed better than anything else this year. Read the customer reviews where people describe you in their own words. Look for the founder's LinkedIn post that got shared far more than usual.

You're looking for patterns. The phrases that keep showing up. The tone that feels most natural. The moments where the writing clicked and nobody had to argue about it. That's your voice, unguarded. That's what you're trying to document.

Adjectives are not a voice

Here's where most brand voice guides go wrong immediately. Someone runs a workshop, fills a whiteboard with personality descriptors, and calls it done. Approachable. Confident. Human. Warm but professional.

Those aren't a voice. They're a starting point at best. Every brand in your category has a list that looks almost identical. Adjectives describe a direction. They don't show anyone how to write a single sentence.

The fix is examples. For every trait you claim, you need to show what it looks like on the page. Not just "we're approachable" but here's an approachable subject line next to one that isn't. Here's how we'd write this product description if we were being true to our voice, and here's how it sounds when we're not. The contrast does more teaching than any descriptor ever could.

The "never" list is often more useful than the "always" list. The words and phrases your brand would never use tell a writer more about your voice than a page of adjectives.

The four things every brand voice guide needs

Voice traits with examples. Three to five characteristics, each illustrated with real before-and-after copy. Not "we're direct" but here's a direct sentence and here's the same thought written passively. Show the difference. (Not sure what your voice traits actually are yet? Start here.)

The never list. Words, phrases and tones that are off-brand. This is non-negotiable. Without guardrails, someone will always drift toward corporate-speak, hollow enthusiasm or whatever they were writing in their last job. Name the things you don't do.

Tone guidance by context. Voice is consistent. Tone shifts. Your brand should sound like itself whether it's writing a product launch or a service outage notice, but those two pieces should not feel identical. Show writers how tone adapts without the voice changing underneath it.

A "sounds like us / doesn't sound like us" section. Real examples, side by side. This is the part people actually use when they're staring at a blank page. Make it specific enough to be genuinely useful.

The test that tells you if it's working

Give the finished guide to someone who has never written for your brand before. Ask them to write three pieces using only the guide as a reference. No briefings, no examples beyond what's in the document.

If the output sounds like your brand, the guide is doing its job. If it doesn't, the guide is missing something. Usually examples. Almost always examples.

A brand voice guide that requires a human interpreter to use is not a guide. It's a philosophy document. Useful for inspiration, useless at 4pm on a Tuesday when someone needs to write a caption.

Brand voice is a practice, not a deliverable

The guide is not the finish line. It's the foundation. The brands that actually maintain a consistent voice are the ones that treat the guide as a living document. They update it when the brand evolves. They add examples when they write something that nails it. They revisit the never list when new bad habits creep in.

One document, maintained well, is worth more than a brand refresh every three years. And it's a lot cheaper.

Build it once. Keep it current. Use it every time someone new sits down to write for your brand. That's the whole system.

If your brand is still working off an adjective list and hoping for the best, let's talk. Building brand voice guides is some of my favorite work, and the difference it makes shows up in every piece of content that comes after it.

What to Look for When Hiring a Financial Services Copywriter

There's a specific kind of bad that financial services copy achieves. It's not incompetent. It's not offensive. It's just airless. Dense with terminology, light on meaning, written as if the goal was to sound credible rather than to actually communicate.

Most of the time, jargon is the culprit. And most of the time, the writer put it there on purpose. They thought that's what financial services copy was supposed to sound like.

It's not. And knowing that distinction is the first thing to look for when you're hiring.

Jargon is not expertise

This is the mistake financial services brands make over and over. They equate technical language with credibility. If the copy sounds like it came from inside the industry, it must be authoritative. Right?

Wrong. Your reader doesn't want to feel like they're reading a prospectus. They want to feel like someone finally explained this in a way that makes sense. The writer who can do that, who can take a complex financial product and make it feel accessible without dumbing it down, is harder to find than the one who can replicate your internal vocabulary.

Jargon is a shortcut. Plain language is the craft.

What to actually look for in a portfolio

When you're reviewing a financial services copywriter's work, don't just check for category experience. Check for clarity.

Can they write about money without making it feel like a chore to read? Financial copy has a reputation for being dry because most people writing it have accepted that reputation as inevitable. It isn't. Look for writers whose work on financial topics feels like the rest of their work: engaged, human, worth reading.

Do they write for the reader or the brand? A lot of financial services copy is written to make the institution feel impressive. The best financial services copy is written to make the reader feel understood. Those are different briefs. The portfolio will tell you which one the writer is solving for.

Can they handle compliance without losing the voice? This is the real skill. Anyone can write clean, legally defensible copy. The question is whether they can do it and still sound like a human being. Look for work that's clearly been through a review process and still has personality in it. That's not easy to pull off.

The jargon test

Here's a simple one. Take a piece of their financial services work and read it out loud. Not in your head. Out loud.

If it flows, if it sounds like something a person might actually say, you're in good shape. If you find yourself stumbling over strings of industry terms, or reading sentences that are technically correct but feel like no one actually wrote them, that's your answer.

Good financial services copy passes the out-loud test. Most of it doesn't.

Experience in the category matters. But not the way you think.

You want a writer who understands how financial services works. Not so they can mirror the industry's existing language back at you, but so they can translate it. There's a meaningful difference between a writer who has learned the vocabulary and a writer who understands the underlying concepts well enough to explain them simply.

The first kind will write copy that sounds financial. The second kind will write copy that works.

Ask them to explain a complex product in two sentences, in plain language, to someone who has never heard of it. The answer will tell you everything.

One more thing

The best financial services copywriters are not impressed by the complexity of your product. They're interested in the person who needs it. That orientation, toward the reader and not the category, is what separates copy that informs from copy that actually moves people.

Jargon impresses insiders. Plain language convinces everyone else. And everyone else is who you're trying to reach.

If you're looking for a financial services copywriter who leads with clarity and leaves the jargon at the door, let's talk. I've spent 20 years translating complex topics into copy that real people actually read.