Diagnosis · fiction, short stories, creative nonfiction
Why does my creative writing sound like AI?
A story can be free of every banned word on every checklist and still read like it was assembled instead of written. The tell is structural, not lexical.
Creative writing gets flagged for a different reason than an essay does: not a banned word, but the shape of a scene. AI-drafted fiction resolves conflict on a predictable schedule, has characters state the feeling a line of dialogue was supposed to imply, and reaches for a symbolic object to carry meaning the scene did not earn. Those three habits, not vocabulary, are what a reader clocks first.
Why this happens to fiction, short stories, creative nonfiction in particular
A short-story prompt asks a model to deliver a complete arc in a page or two, and completeness reads as resolution: the fight ends, the door closes, the light changes, all inside the length the prompt implied. Real scenes often do not resolve that cleanly, but an unresolved ending looks like an unfinished answer to something optimizing for a satisfying reply. Dialogue suffers the same compression. Subtext takes room to build through what a character avoids saying, and a short draft does not have that room, so the model has a character say the feeling outright instead of withholding it. And because the prompt is asking for creative writing specifically, the draft reaches for a tangible symbol, a key, a photograph, a held breath, to signal literary weight the scene itself has not earned yet.
The tells that show up here
Not every AI tell appears everywhere. These are the ones that cluster on this surface, and what it is about the format that produces them.
- in-a-world-where
- This opener announces the whole premise before a single concrete moment happens, the scene-setting equivalent of the validating opener: establish everything up front instead of starting inside a beat.
- not-x-its-y
- In dialogue and interiority both, a character explains a feeling by first denying a plainer one, exactly the reframe a reader would cut in a workshop for telling instead of showing.
- testament-family
- An ordinary object gets promoted to a symbol the scene never built: a letter or a photograph carrying meaning about a relationship the story has not shown enough of to earn it.
- em-dash-chain
- A run of dashes inside one paragraph often marks the exact spot where a scene chose an emotional beat instead of writing one, a dash standing in for each gesture.
Before and after
A generic AI draft on the left. On the right, the real output of running that draft through underslop, checked so it adds no name or number the draft did not already carry. The voice is The Recluse, dense and allusive: says little, means all of it.
In a world where grief followed her everywhere, Mara stood at the window — coffee gone cold beside her — staring at nothing. It wasn't sadness, it was something deeper, a hollow ache she couldn't name. "I'm not okay," she said, "but I will be. Loss has taught me love never really leaves us." The photograph on the sill stood as a testament to everything they had shared. Some doors, she thought, close so others can open.
The photograph on the sill is the only object in the room that has not been tidied away. Mara stood at the window with cold coffee beside her and stared at nothing. Not sadness; a hollow ache with no name she could find for it. "I'm not okay," she said. "But I will be." Loss, she claimed, teaches that love never leaves. Perhaps. What it teaches more reliably is that a person can learn to live with the shape of a door that is closed, which is not the same as believing another one will open.
How to fix it yourself
- Find the sentence that resolves the scene Read the last paragraph on its own. If it ties off the conflict cleanly in one sentence, cut that sentence and end one beat earlier, where the reader still has some work left to do.
- Read the dialogue without the tags Strip the attribution and the stage direction and read only what each character says. If a line states the emotion the scene was building toward, cut the statement and trust the scene that led up to it.
- Find the object doing too much work If a key, a photograph, or a held object is carrying meaning the scene has not shown, either build the scene that earns it or let the object stay an ordinary thing.
- Count the dashes in one paragraph Two or more in a stretch usually means an emotional beat got handed to punctuation instead of written as an action or a line. Replace at least one with a full stop and see if the beat survives.
Questions
Why does my creative writing sound like AI?
Usually not vocabulary. Check whether the ending resolves too cleanly for the space it had, whether a character states the feeling a scene was supposed to imply through action, and whether an object carries more symbolic weight than the scene built for it. Those three habits read as generated even in banned-word-free prose.
Why is my writing similar to AI?
If it's fiction specifically, look for a schedule to the plot rather than a lexicon: does every scene resolve inside the length it was given, and does dialogue explain its own subtext instead of leaving it for the reader? Those structural habits generalize across models more reliably than any word list does.
What makes writing sound like AI?
In fiction, it is rarely a word. It is a resolution that lands too neatly, a symbol the scene didn't earn, and dialogue that states what it should only imply. All three come from a model completing a prompt inside a fixed length, which rewards tidy closure over the mess real scenes usually have.
How to make writing sound not AI?
For fiction, end a beat earlier than feels finished, cut the line where a character explains their own feeling, and let at least one object in the scene stay ordinary instead of symbolic. Those three edits do more than removing any word from a banned list.
This page explains the cause. underslop is the edit: paste up to 500 words on the free tier, and it marks the tells it could not remove. Your text is held for 0 seconds.