# Why AI-Generated Text Cannot Be Reliably Identified by Stylistic "Tells"

DevFeed: [Why AI-Generated Text Cannot Be Reliably Identified by Stylistic "Tells"](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/no-you-can-t-tell-it-was-written-by-ai-25839.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://segunfamisa.com/posts/no-you-cant-tell-it-was-written-by-ai>)

Author: Segun Famisa

Published: 2026-02-05T06:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Segun Famisa](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/segun-famisa.md>)

Topics: [Artificial Intelligence](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai.md>)

Tags: [ai](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai.md>), [personal](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/personal.md>)

## AI overview

This essay argues that stylistic "tells" are not reliable evidence that a document was written by AI. It explains that many styles associated with AI existed in human writing before AI and may also reflect the human content, annotation, and labor involved in training AI systems.

## Source excerpt

Preface Yes. This is another AI post. It's kinda hard to ignore. I 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. I 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. In 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. This essay is 100% written by me. I did not use AI for anything. Not even for grammar or spelling check, formatting or tone adjustments. You 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. I 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. Ready? Yeah, let's delve into it. AI Did Not Just Invent Styles. Humans Used It First 1 The first argument is, any pattern you think you have noticed from AI usage was first used by humans. This is an undebatable fact. These AIs did not just materialise. They were trained on original human content. AI Has Elements of the Stylistic Choices of the People Who Trained It 2 My second argument is that the styles we see with AI, reflect the stylistic choices of the people who did training and annotation. The development of AI had many phases. Many of those phases involved grunt work of people--humans 3, manually inputing data, annotating it, and scoring the AI outputs. So who trained it? A lot of the early training, data annotations and other manual processes, happened with cheap lab