Fluency got cheap. It shows.

You learn to spot it. A homepage that promises to revolutionize how teams work. A founder’s post about maximizing impact in a fast-moving landscape. A three-person consultancy writing in the exact voice of a company with forty thousand.

I read those words, and I trust the company less.

Anyone who sells expertise should find this uncomfortable. The words meant to make you sound like an expert now do the opposite. They are the house style of a machine, and by this point most people can hear it.

The tell is measurable now

This is not a matter of taste. It shows up in the data.

In 2024 a group of researchers read through more than 15 million medical abstracts on PubMed and counted words. After ChatGPT arrived, a specific set of them climbed in a way nothing in the record ever had, not even the pandemic. Delve. Intricate. Showcasing. Commendable. Meticulous. Realm. Words almost nobody was reaching for at that rate in 2021, suddenly everywhere. The authors estimate at least one abstract in eight in 2024 had been through a model, and in some corners closer to two in five. (Kobak et al., later published in Science Advances.)

These are scientists, writing up real work they did, and the fingerprint is still that loud. Now picture a marketing team the Friday before a launch.

The open web is further along. Ahrefs ran a detector over 900,000 fresh pages in April 2025 and found about 74% of them carried AI-generated writing. Most was not pure machine output. It was the mix: a person prompting, pasting, and shipping. Which is the exact shape of a tell.

Vague is the other tell

The vocabulary is the easy one to catch. The harder one is the sentence that says nothing.

‘We help companies achieve their goals.’ ‘Solutions tailored to your needs.’ True of everyone, so about no one. A model reaches for this by default, because a claim with a real number or a named situation is a claim it might get wrong. It avoids that risk, and so does anyone hiding the fact that they have nothing specific to say.

A niche expert who writes in general statements has argued themselves out of the one thing they were selling.

The same account does all of it

I have watched how senior people use these tools day to day, up close. It is not the version in the demo.

One chat window holds a reply to a board email, a draft of the new landing page, a question about a knee that has been hurting, and a bit of holiday planning, all in the same half hour. The tool has no idea which of these is the company’s public face. It gives the landing page the same even, agreeable treatment it gave the knee.

So the thing that reaches the customer carries the same low, flat effort as the errand next to it. The executive feels productive. Fourteen things, handled. The output is fluent and forgettable, and it goes out with the company’s name on it.

Fluency used to be a proxy for effort

For a long time, sounding polished was a fair sign that someone had done the work. Clean writing was expensive. It needed a person who understood the subject and could shape a sentence, and you could not fake much of it at scale.

That proxy is gone. Fluency is free now. So a page that is merely smooth proves nothing, and a page built out of the tells proves something specific: nobody here cared enough to read it twice before it went live.

Buyers are already reading you this way. In Edelman and LinkedIn’s work on B2B decision-makers, 73% said a company’s thought-leadership content is a more trustworthy way to judge its ability than its marketing and product material. They read your writing to decide whether you are any good. When the writing is the machine’s and not yours, that is the answer they leave with.

Everyone ends up at the same voice

There is a second cost, and it lands hardest on the people who sell on being different.

In a controlled study, Doshi and Hauser had people write short stories with and without a model’s help. On their own, the assisted stories scored as more creative. Lined up next to each other, they were measurably more alike.

Read that twice if your whole pitch is that you see what others miss. The tool that makes today’s post look sharper is, across everything you publish, sanding you toward the middle. And the middle is the one place a specialist cannot afford to be seen. If you cannot say the specific thing, what you are left with is a template where a position should be.

The cheap thing is now the rare thing

None of this is an argument against the tools. I use them every day. They are good at the work nobody should be doing by hand: the first pass, the boring reformat, the summary of a forty-message thread. I have written about where that line sits, in augment your people, don’t replace them.

It is an argument against shipping the first draft as your voice. And the fix is not expensive. Read it before it goes out. Cut the word you would never say to a client’s face. Put back the specific number, the real example, the opinion a machine will not take the risk of holding. Say the one thing only you would have known to say.

That used to be the baseline. It is the whole difference now, because almost nobody bothers.

The effort it takes is small. Ten minutes and a red pen. When a brand will not spend even that on the words it puts its name to, it is telling you something true about how it will treat your account.

It did not mean to say it out loud.

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