Five words that out AI-written copy
Five words that out AI-written copy instantly.
Stunning. Breathtaking. Awe-inspiring. Mesmerizing. Transformative.
If you see three of these in a single LinkedIn post or website page, the writer wasn't writing. They pressed generate, did not edit, and shipped.
The reason these words tell: they're emotional placeholders that describe how the writer wants you to feel, not anything specific about the subject. "Stunning architecture" tells you nothing. "Twelve-meter ceilings, single curved skylight, no internal columns" tells you something. The first sentence sounds professional. The second sentence is professional.
The default GPT/Claude/Gemini output is full of these words because the training data — marketing copy on the internet — is full of them. The models learned that marketing prose sounds a certain way and generates more of the same. You have to actively strip these words to make the copy read like a human wrote it.
My copywriting workflow has a hard ban list. About forty words and phrases. Stunning is on it. Leverage is on it. Seamless is on it. Empower is on it. Game-changing is on it. Unleash is on it. So is "in today's fast-paced world" and "navigate the landscape" and "delve into" and "at the end of the day" and "moving forward".
Every draft gets a regex search for the ban list. Any hit gets rewritten with something specific. The result reads tight, almost terse, like a person who knows what they're talking about and isn't dressing it up.
Clients who hire me to fix their existing marketing copy almost always need this same exercise first. Before any strategy, before any new ideas, just strip the slop. The improvement is usually visible in week one.