Speaker 1: You can always tell when something's been written by AI with.
Speaker 2: Little human involvement. You know what I mean?
Speaker 1: A LinkedIn post that starts with in today's fast paced world,
Speaker 1: or an article that ends with it's not about X,
Speaker 1: it's about why. A paragraph but technically fine, but somehow
Speaker 1: feels like it was written by nobody. And that is
Speaker 1: the uncanny valley of AI writing. And the problem isn't
Speaker 1: just that it sounds robotic, it's that people stop reading.
Speaker 1: The frustrating part is that this happens even when you
Speaker 1: have done the thinking, You write the ideas, hand it
Speaker 1: to AI for a cleanup, and it AI effies the
Speaker 1: whole thing, flattening your voice and coding it with M
Speaker 1: dashes until nothing sounds like you anymore. So today Neo
Speaker 1: and I get into exactly how to stop that from happening.
Speaker 1: We cover specific instructions you can give to AI to
Speaker 1: keep your writings sounding human, things like mixing sentence lengths,
Speaker 1: avoiding stiff transitions, and banning the.
Speaker 2: Rule of three. To see what I did there, I
Speaker 2: just choose it. We also go through.
Speaker 1: Some of the most overused AI words and phrases to
Speaker 1: strike from your prompts entirely and now as a little bonus,
Speaker 1: you will find a link in the show notes to
Speaker 1: our anti AI slot prompt, which is a ready to
Speaker 1: use resource you can customize with your own personal pet
Speaker 1: hates and run any content through before it goes out. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's get on with the show. Welcome to how IAI
Speaker 1: with me, Doctor Amantha Imber and Neo Applin, head of
Speaker 1: Inventium AI. Each episode we share one practical way to
Speaker 1: use AI better at.
Speaker 2: Work and in life.
Speaker 1: No fluff, no tech jargon, just things you can use
Speaker 1: straight away. So much content in the world is clearly
Speaker 1: written by AI now, and I know that it.
Speaker 2: Really frustrates us, But like, why is it a problem?
Speaker 1: Why should we actually be aiming to not sound like
Speaker 1: AI when we are all using AI to create the
Speaker 1: content and words we are putting out into the world.
Speaker 3: Now, Yeah, I think it's really two parts. One is
Speaker 3: don't be AI, in other words, don't just get AI
Speaker 3: to do all your work for you. And then the
Speaker 3: second part is don't sound like AI. And I think
Speaker 3: because a lot of people are now doing things where
Speaker 3: they're going like five dot points and say write me
Speaker 3: a big article, and it might be there are five
Speaker 3: pages that really Ai wrote all of it apart from
Speaker 3: five dot points worth, and it just feels and smells
Speaker 3: like AI, and it just has all the tales like
Speaker 3: everyone knows about the M dashes. But you can just
Speaker 3: read it and go, ah, this doesn't sound It sounds
Speaker 3: like CHGBT. And so you can get AI to do
Speaker 3: all the work and it sounds like AI. The other
Speaker 3: thing is you can do most of the work and
Speaker 3: then get AI to do a cleanup at the end,
Speaker 3: and it will sound like AI. And so everyone's going
Speaker 3: to look at that and go, the whole thing's written
Speaker 3: by AI, and then they'll disregard it like they probably
Speaker 3: should about the first one, which is just all written
Speaker 3: by AI. So if you build some stuff that sounds
Speaker 3: like AI, people are going to roll their eyes and
Speaker 3: they may not read it with the same kind of
Speaker 3: intent or kind of care that they would if it
Speaker 3: was sounding like you. And they go, oh my god,
Speaker 3: I Mattha right the whole thing, And I really want
Speaker 3: to listen to everything she was said, and I really
Speaker 3: want to read it intensely rather than I don't know
Speaker 3: if AIS written this. Therefore I'll just skim it, or
Speaker 3: I'll get AI to summarize it.
Speaker 1: So the point of this episode is not to say
Speaker 1: don't use AI to help you write things, but perhaps
Speaker 1: don't use AI to do all the thinking and all
Speaker 1: the content creation. And so then the point of us
Speaker 1: helping you not sound like AI means that the work
Speaker 1: that you do produce, that you do genuinely think about
Speaker 1: and work with AI to refine and edit and so forth,
Speaker 1: gets taken a whole lot more seriously rather than people
Speaker 1: just dismissing it. So Neo, I know that in the
Speaker 1: Inventium AI training, when we're teaching people how to use
Speaker 1: AI for writing, you actually do go into this. So
Speaker 1: what are some of the things that you're teaching people
Speaker 1: to avoid sounding like AI?
Speaker 3: The first one I will say is this, Like often
Speaker 3: we'll get it like a paragraph and you might say, look,
Speaker 3: I need you to clean up this paragraph AI, so
Speaker 3: you're not getting it to write the whole damn thing.
Speaker 3: And the first tip is telling AI don't make this
Speaker 3: sound more complicated than the original. So IT often likes
Speaker 3: to have these big words and be very stiff and
Speaker 3: quite formal unless you've previously told it you know what
Speaker 3: you like it to sound like, and things like that.
Speaker 3: So the quickest easiest one is just saying something along
Speaker 3: the lines of, don't make the output more complicated than
Speaker 3: in the regional when you give it a paragraph and
Speaker 3: ask it to critique it and clean it up and
Speaker 3: things like that. But there are other ones that you
Speaker 3: can add in. So the first one is the most
Speaker 3: obvious one, but there's a bit of a catch on
Speaker 3: how to do it. You know those M dashes that
Speaker 3: seem to pop up everywhere, So I'll just explain for
Speaker 3: those who aren't sure what an M dash is, and
Speaker 3: M dash is a longer dash. This is a I
Speaker 3: probably should get you to explain this, you're the actual
Speaker 3: author here, but yeah, it's a proper way to write things, right.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, So they're like visually they look like a
Speaker 1: double hyphen So if you can imagine two hyphens connected,
Speaker 1: that's what an m dash looks like. And because AI
Speaker 1: was trained on books, if you read any book and
Speaker 1: they're using you know, like language like and I'm just
Speaker 1: trying to think of a sentence that has like an
Speaker 1: M dash in it, so you know it might be
Speaker 1: run every piece of content through this list before publishing,
Speaker 1: and if you spot three or more, rewrite, so like
Speaker 1: you could theoretically have an M dash before the end,
Speaker 1: just to kind of break up the sentence.
Speaker 2: You'll see it in any book that you're reading.
Speaker 1: And because AI was trained on all those books, a
Speaker 1: lot of M dashes went into the system in terms
Speaker 1: of its knowledge, and it's.
Speaker 3: Really hard baked in there because AI is a product
Speaker 3: of its training, because it was trained on so many books,
Speaker 3: then M dashes are everywhere throughout its training, and it
Speaker 3: just pulls out M dashes an awful lot, and it's
Speaker 3: really hard to get AI to not use M dashes.
Speaker 3: But so rather than just say don't use M dashes,
Speaker 3: I found that that has a very low chance of working.
Speaker 3: Sometimes it does gish kind of Sometimes. The phrase that
Speaker 3: I use, which has given me the best success is this.
Speaker 3: Now it's don't use M dashes, So that is, don't
Speaker 3: use em space dashes. And then I actually give it
Speaker 3: an example of an M dash, So I actually paste
Speaker 3: in an M dash within brackets, so it then knows
Speaker 3: that's an M dash. I've been really clear about this,
Speaker 3: and you could if you don't like short dashes either,
Speaker 3: you could say or short dashes, and then you can
Speaker 3: put the short dash in an inner brackets. Rely on
Speaker 3: commas full stops or short shorter sentences instead, So you
Speaker 3: could do things like that, or you could write it
Speaker 3: if you're affine with the dash, you just want them
Speaker 3: to be short. It'd be don't use M dashes, paste
Speaker 3: in an M dash instead. I want you to use
Speaker 3: short dashes and then paste in the short dash. So
Speaker 3: it's up to you whether you want to ban the
Speaker 3: dash or you just want to keep the short dash,
Speaker 3: but yet give it first off, the words and also
Speaker 3: the example of what the dash is you're talking about,
Speaker 3: and I found that is better, but not one hundred
Speaker 3: percent why it loves the M dash and it's really
Speaker 3: hard to get it to stop doing.
Speaker 1: What are some of the other things that you teach
Speaker 1: in inventium dot AI programs.
Speaker 3: These are all to undo some of the very common
Speaker 3: things that AI does, and with AI doing in the
Speaker 3: commonly things, it's doing it the right way. And I'm
Speaker 3: doing your quotes here because the right way to write
Speaker 3: is the very formal way to write, and it's been
Speaker 3: trained on the right way to write by a whole
Speaker 3: bunch of books and sources, and also you know the
Speaker 3: guides on how to write well, and so therefore you
Speaker 3: know if you're a native English speaker and you're you know,
Speaker 3: you've done a lot of writing, chances are you more
Speaker 3: get caught of these AI detectors and things like that.
Speaker 3: So it's almost like putting the human back into it,
Speaker 3: making it a little bit messier than the perfect way
Speaker 3: to write. Okay, So with that first one's the second
Speaker 3: one is mix sentence lengths. And the reason for this
Speaker 3: is AI generally has the same sentence length again and
Speaker 3: again and again, and so when you and I read this,
Speaker 3: we may not actually pick up that these sentence lengths
Speaker 3: are the same, but we just go this doesn't feel
Speaker 3: like a human so we get that kind of like
Speaker 3: the uncanny valley of writing. So say mix sentence lengths,
Speaker 3: these short ones for punch. He's longer ones when you
Speaker 3: need detail, And I found that one does pretty well.
Speaker 3: So if you remember hending Away famous for short, punchy sentences,
Speaker 3: so get some punchy things in there, get some detailed
Speaker 3: ones that mixes it up and you and I reading
Speaker 3: it go okay. Another one is the language that AI uses.
Speaker 3: It can try to be the smartest AI in the
Speaker 3: room and can like to use those long words as
Speaker 3: part of that don't make the thing more complicated. So
Speaker 3: you could do something like this, use playing language at
Speaker 3: a ninth at about a ninth grade and reading level,
Speaker 3: avoid jargon and buzzwords. Now that the ninth grade thing
Speaker 3: or the fourteen year old type brief is common along
Speaker 3: in industry practice, I understand when the newspaper or pro
Speaker 3: writing and things like that, that's the kind of goal to
Speaker 3: get to. Why because everyone can just read that pretty simply,
Speaker 3: pretty easily. It's not really difficult to read, and you're
Speaker 3: not going to pull out university style words that are
Speaker 3: only a handful of people going to understand. So that's
Speaker 3: why you do that. The other ones are sometimes it
Speaker 3: deals with the way that sentences is constructed. Particularly start
Speaker 3: of sentences can be a bit stiff. So one of
Speaker 3: the things is it's fine to start a sentence with
Speaker 3: and but also although you should do this sparingly, so
Speaker 3: occasionally we will actually start a sentence with a handbuilt
Speaker 3: but or so that's not the right way to do it.
Speaker 3: I'm doing air quotes again, but humans do that, and
Speaker 3: so therefore let's let AI do it. Not do it
Speaker 3: all the time, but we'll let it do it. The
Speaker 3: other one about starting sentences is avoid stiff transitions such
Speaker 3: as additionally and moreover. Who's start human says moreover blah
Speaker 3: blah blah blah blah. You know, you feel like you're
Speaker 3: like a stuffy person in the eighteen hundreds with a
Speaker 3: pipe or something. So I avoid stiff transitions such as
Speaker 3: additionally and moreover. Now this is a weird one, but
Speaker 3: I find this one. I used to like, but now
Speaker 3: I hate that AI does. Often it'll frame things in
Speaker 3: a particular way near the end of a sentence, end
Speaker 3: of a paragraph. It'll say half bunch of explanation stuff,
Speaker 3: and I want to say, it's not this. It's so it
Speaker 3: maybe like, it's not just a good way of writing,
Speaker 3: it's the way to communicate something.
Speaker 2: Like that, right, AI.
Speaker 3: It does this a lot, and actually was at the
Speaker 3: start when it was coming, I was, Oh, that's really clever.
Speaker 3: It does that really well. I like, but it over
Speaker 3: uses that mechanism, and so therefore I actually had to
Speaker 3: google to find out what that mechanism was called. It's
Speaker 3: called corrective antithesis. So I say, never use corrective antithesis,
Speaker 3: And then in brackets, given an example, I say, for example,
Speaker 3: not X, but why and then that certainly cuts that down.
Speaker 3: And there's one more if I can throw it in there,
Speaker 3: which is don't lean on the rule of three. Now,
Speaker 3: the rule of three is generally you give examples. You
Speaker 3: can give three examples, and it kind of makes you know,
Speaker 3: it reads nicely. But AI over uses the rule of three.
Speaker 3: It over uses that in so many things, and so
Speaker 3: I say, don't lean on the rule of three. Use
Speaker 3: one or two items, or use a longer list if
Speaker 3: it strengthens the point. So you can do one or two,
Speaker 3: or you can do five. You know, up to you,
Speaker 3: but don't always use rule of three, because it's that consistency,
Speaker 3: like the sentence lengths being the same, the rule of
Speaker 3: three being the same. It's not this, it's that being
Speaker 3: the same that feels very robotic. Because robots are really
Speaker 3: good at doing things the same ais really good things
Speaker 3: the same. Humans we're messier, and so we're used to
Speaker 3: seeing things that a little bit messier. And it's also
Speaker 3: easier and nicer for us to read because it kind
Speaker 3: of feels more like us. And so this is just
Speaker 3: a whole bunch of points you can put in if
Speaker 3: like you've got this as a standard prompt, all those
Speaker 3: what have I got one to three, four, over, six, seven, eight,
Speaker 3: seven or eight dot points? You can just drop them
Speaker 3: in and then say, when you rewrite my paragraph because
Speaker 3: I needed to be cleaned up, don't do these things.
Speaker 3: That's what you're trying to tell them.
Speaker 2: Okay, I love all those.
Speaker 1: Now what I did ne in preparation for this episode
Speaker 1: is I went into all the llms that I use
Speaker 1: and like I love comparing the output, so I went
Speaker 1: into chatpt Claude, Gemini and also Perplexity, and I gave
Speaker 1: it all the same prompt, which was something along the
Speaker 1: lines of.
Speaker 2: Tell me what are the fifty.
Speaker 1: Most overused or over indexed words and phrases that AI
Speaker 1: likes to use, and I think I suggested to look
Speaker 1: at LinkedIn for some you know, some examples. And then
Speaker 1: what I did with the output that I got from
Speaker 1: each of those four models, I then put them all
Speaker 1: into the one model Claudes generally the one that I
Speaker 1: default too, and I said, give me a summary of
Speaker 1: the ones that are appearing most frequently across these four outputs.
Speaker 1: And so with that, I've then created a bit of
Speaker 1: a mega prompt that people can use that I've called
Speaker 1: the anti ai slop prompt and if you want that,
Speaker 1: I will link to it in the show notes. But
Speaker 1: I'm just going to go through a few things just
Speaker 1: for some additional advice for people that are trying to
Speaker 1: un ai aify their writing so often. And these are
Speaker 1: grouped into some categories. So there's the first category is
Speaker 1: empty opener phrases. So you will have seen things like
Speaker 1: this in today's fast paced world, in an ever changing
Speaker 1: landscape when it comes to.
Speaker 2: Blah, picture this black like.
Speaker 1: These are all sounding really familiar because these are how
Speaker 1: a lot of certainly a lot of LinkedIn post starts start. Now,
Speaker 1: then we've got a category of fake profound hooks, which
Speaker 1: I think, you know, it's not X, it's why is
Speaker 1: certainly one of those. Here's the truth, which is one
Speaker 1: of my pet hates, or sometimes he's the uncomfortable truth,
Speaker 1: he's the inconvenient truth. I hate that one because I
Speaker 1: use that language here the truth or here's the thing.
Speaker 1: I actually use that a lot in my writing. And
Speaker 1: what is really frustrating, as someone who was writing books
Speaker 1: before the age of AI is that I feel like
Speaker 1: I now have to change my writing style, which was
Speaker 1: you know, certainly in some ways similar to what AI
Speaker 1: produces to you know, just added like I used m
Speaker 1: dashes very often, but now I will lean more towards
Speaker 1: brackets and semi collins for like little asides or quips
Speaker 1: as my editor calls them, which is very frustrating when
Speaker 1: you have to change your own writing style so it
Speaker 1: doesn't look like AI. And we've got lots of corporate buzzwords.
Speaker 1: Probably the most common is delve. I was hearing some
Speaker 1: research actually that was done in twenty twenty three where
Speaker 1: academic authors that were most prolific in twenty twenty three
Speaker 1: in terms of getting things published over indexed heavily on
Speaker 1: the word delve. I don't know if you've heard that research.
Speaker 1: I heard Ethan like sharing that recently, which made me laugh.
Speaker 3: I didn't hear that researcher. I'm a bit sad about
Speaker 3: delve because I use delve as well, but AI uses
Speaker 3: it more. And so you may add a bunch of words.
Speaker 3: Can we also talk about other words we may want
Speaker 3: to add to that banned list?
Speaker 2: For sure? For sure? Give me like three.
Speaker 3: More quietly is another one that I was going.
Speaker 2: To say quietly.
Speaker 1: So the next category actually is what AI has termed
Speaker 1: hollow adjectives and nouns and adjectives, and if you don't
Speaker 1: remember from your English class, and adjective is a descriptive
Speaker 1: word for a noun, So it describes a noun which
Speaker 1: is like an object or a person, a person, place
Speaker 1: or thing. I think is how my English teacher probably
Speaker 1: would have described it. Quietly is so overused. And again
Speaker 1: that really bothers me because that is a word that
Speaker 1: I would have used, but now I feel like I
Speaker 1: have to strip it out mostly from my writing.
Speaker 2: Okay, what are the words near this?
Speaker 3: Ultimately, I would recommend you build your own list of
Speaker 3: words that you don't want AI to use, because there's
Speaker 3: some there that AI will have used, like Delvin quietly,
Speaker 3: but there may be others that IT would use that
Speaker 3: I find words but you would never use. So I
Speaker 3: use the example of like buzzword bingo, so like synergistic. Right,
Speaker 3: if AI uses the words synergistic and you would never
Speaker 3: use it, then put a list together and add to
Speaker 3: that list, but sudogistic in there, maybe put delve in there,
Speaker 3: maybe put quietly in there, and go, don't ever use
Speaker 3: these words, And so build up that list and enhance
Speaker 3: that over time as AI uses words that just great
Speaker 3: on you, because if you've been grading on you, they
Speaker 3: don't sound like you.
Speaker 2: So hopefully.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is so much to take in, as
Speaker 1: I said, for those that are listening and like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I really, I really need to improve my writing output
Speaker 1: because I could relate to a lot of those things,
Speaker 1: and I think about my writing. Yes, I'm using a
Speaker 1: lot of the things that Neo and a manter I
Speaker 1: have talked about. Go to the show notes. There is
Speaker 1: a link to get our anti AI slopped prompt, which
Speaker 1: I highly recommend you customize.
Speaker 2: So it's a lengthy prompt.
Speaker 1: It includes a lot of what we've spoken about today,
Speaker 1: but do read it and put in your own personal
Speaker 1: pet peeves so that you can customize it and run
Speaker 1: any content that you create or create with AI through
Speaker 1: this prompt. It will improve your work a lot. And
Speaker 1: also I would say, please share this episode with maybe
Speaker 1: some people that you know that are perhaps producing a
Speaker 1: bit of AI slot, but they are actually doing the
Speaker 1: thinking themselves, which is the worst combination where the human
Speaker 1: is doing the majority of the work and AI is
Speaker 1: then going over it and AI are fying it and
Speaker 1: completely destroying that person's credibility, so do share this episode
Speaker 1: with those that need it. How i AI was hosted
Speaker 1: by me Amantha Imber and Neo Applan. A big thank
Speaker 1: you to Martin Imba who does our sound editing and
Speaker 1: Jem Rubio for production support, and thank you to John
Speaker 1: Kilby who composed the theme music