{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://segunfamisa.com/posts/no-you-cant-tell-it-was-written-by-ai",
  "description": "Strong opinions about AI \"tells\"",
  "path": "/posts/no-you-cant-tell-it-was-written-by-ai",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-05T06:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:a5mekodp4afxadlpr4hp2wci/site.standard.publication/3mm2oa7vz5327",
  "tags": [
    "ai",
    "non-tech"
  ],
  "textContent": "Preface   \nYes. This is another AI post. It's kinda hard to ignore.\n\nI have seen people casually claim that a post, text, or an article was AI-written, and they're usually wrong. Of course, not always. I am not speaking to the cases where you know the author and their style, or you have seen the content somewhere else, or the content is straight up gibberish or nonsensical.   \n   \nI am speaking about the cases where people assert that certain \"tells\" people have that make them know that a document or email was written by AI.   \n   \nIn this essay, I will argue that, your favourite \"tells\" that a document was produced by AI, at best, is wrong, and depending on your position, in life, at worst, is dangerous and harmful.   \n   \nThis essay is 100% written by me. I did not use AI for anything. Not even for grammar or spelling check, formatting or tone adjustments.   \nYou will see some ideas and claims that I make that other people have also made. These arguments are definitely not unique to me, so I am not claiming to be the first to be making them.   \nI will intentionally use some of the \"tells\" I have seen people claim leads them to conclude it's AI, and I will try to reference the related literary and rhetorical device, if any.\n\nReady? Yeah, let's delve into it.   \nAI Did Not Just Invent Styles. Humans Used It First [^1]   \nThe first argument is, any pattern you think you have noticed from AI usage was first used by humans.    \nThis is an undebatable fact. These AIs did not just materialise. They were trained on original human content.   \n   \nAI Has Elements of the Stylistic Choices of the People Who Trained It [^3]   \nMy second argument is that the styles we see with AI, reflect the stylistic choices of the people who did training and annotation.   \nThe development of AI had many phases. Many of those phases involved grunt work of people—humans [^2], manually inputing data, annotating it, and scoring the AI outputs.   \nSo who trained it? A lot of the early training, data annotations and other manual processes, happened with cheap labour in African countries. There are multiple sources that have revealed the hidden economy of workers that big-tech outsources these kinds of tasks to African countries with unstable political situations, weaker workers rights, and cheap labour.   \nHow do I know AI adapted their styles? I will tell you.[^4]   \nYou see, I am Nigerian, and we are known for our flowery, flamboyant, and persuasory style of speaking and writing. It is very likely that this is a trait from our traditional languages that filtered into our use of English language.   \nI remember Paul Graham saying that \"delve\" is an indicator that an email was composed with AI.\n\nDelve is a staple word in Nigeria. This word has been around all my life - from primary school, it's like an everyday word. And you can see how Nigerians reacted to Paul Graham's assertion. Their reactions on Twitter resonate with me.\n\nI use Nigeria in this context, because I am Nigerian, but you can easily replace it with any other African country or Asian country—basically people who had to learn English as a second language.\n\nA lot of people that learned English and speak more than one language, did so by reading books, consuming magazines, news, etc., and that exposes them to atypical, obscure or big-sounding words like \"delve\", that apparently, Americans or other \"native speakers\" don't use.\n\nI think it is clear that the stylistic choices of these AIs are influenced heavily from the stylistic choices of the people that big tech contracted to do the training.   \n   \nAI Detection Tools Are Unreliable   \nAny AI detector that tells you it can reliably detect AI usage in text is very likely lying to you. Even OpenAI's detector was shut down because it was not found to be reliable.\n\nMIT also affirmed that AI detectors simply do not work. We should be thinking of how to evolve our pedagogic processes, rather than trying to sniff out who is using AI or not.   \nAnd Why Is It Bad To Guess?   \nI hope that by now, you are starting to agree with me, that there is no objective basis for being able to infer that a document was written with AI.   \n\nUnless you personally know the person writing the content and are familiar with their natural style, any intuition you may think you've developed for AI giveaways is almost certainly inaccurate.\n\nThe reason why this is problematic is that depending on your position, it could range from harmless to harmful really quickly.    \n\nIn the best scenario, it's just a harmless wrong assertion. In a worse scenario, if you are a person in a position of power—say an investor, a recruiter, a professor, a manager, etc., your attempt or your intuition to classify a text as AI-generated is very likely to have real life consequences on that person. What's worse is that you do that with no provable or reliable reasoning. It is just wrong. And, you stand a risk of being biased against a huge population of people on earth.   \nWrapping up   \nI feel very strongly about this, obviously, because of my cultural background and because I have seen people with my background being accused of cheating, because an AI detector told someone so. \n\nAt almost every stage in my life, I have had to prove that I can speak English language, despite being from a country colonised by the Brits, and doing all of my academic endeavours in English. I am still forced to take IELTS or TOEFL, almost everywhere. If I am applying to study (in English) in GERMANY, they will ask me to prove to them that I can speak English, but to apply for a student visa, I will need to translate my English documents to German. Hello??\n\nAs found out in this study from Stanford, non-native English speakers are more likely to be accused of using AI (full study is here),  because of a combination of the reasons I have highlighted in this essay and it all feels like a round of punishment.\n\n> First, they made us learn English. Then we did it so well, that we started to use words that are uncommon to them. Then, they had us do the grunt work of training the AI models. Next, the AI models started sounding like us, and now we are being accused that we are cheating.[^5]\n\nI have further thoughts on the demographics that institutions consider to be native speakers, but, I won't get into that in this post. It seems to me to be more of a citizenship filter than an actual ability to use the language. A quick look at who is considered to be native English speakers according to the Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) industry will tell you more.\n\nI will not sit back and shy away from using good writing and speaking skills, in an attempt to not sound like AI.\n\nI will always resist and argue against any attempt to extrapolate an AI tell, and I encourage you to join me.   \n   \nThank you for reading.   \n   \nFootnotes   \n[^1]: Antithesis - contrary to multiple claims, humans do in fact, use antithesis as a rhetorical device.   \n[^2]: Em-dash. I will not stop using this. Call me AI all you want.\n[^3]: AP style title case. This is an age-old writing style that has been in existence in academic and journalistic writing. Wikipedia claims it's a sign of undisclosed AI usage, and I strongly and vehemently disagree.   \n[^4]: Rhetorical question. People also claim that using rhetorical questions is a sign of undisclosed AI usage, and again, I adamantly disagree.   \n[^5]: Diectic expression. Sort of using vague non-descriptive words that require context to fill in.",
  "title": "No. You can't tell it was written by AI"
}