At FindLaw, I was part of a team of writer coaches. It was our job to help writers who were struggling and get them back on track. We also took turns sending out weekly emails addressing common questions, changes to rules or processes and recurring errors that we were seeing. I was developing the following email when I got laid off.

Don't Rely Too Heavily On AI

As AI is becoming a bigger part of your job as a writer, it's important to make sure that it is you doing the lion's share of the writing and not the AI. All AI tools use controlled randomness to make sure that responses to similar prompts do not come out identical (this is called temperature and sampling), but we are noticing a lot of copy that seems to follow a similar pattern.

For example, copy pasted directly from AI almost always includes a first sentence after the H1 headline that is just a sentence-length version of the H1. On pages about wrongful death, the phrase "these trying times" almost always pops up in the first two sentences. The word navigate and all of its iterations will appear multiple times on every page. And of course, the infamous overuse of the em dash (which AI uses without spaces on either side of the dash; a violation of AP style).

The reason these patterns appear is that AI software begins with training, which is done by developers. During training, the model develops patterns, specific words, phrases, and structures it returns to repeatedly. These patterns show up in everyone's AI-generated copy, not just ours. You may not notice the repetition, but others do.

It's important to remember that even before the advent of AI, we had clients who complained that all of our websites read like they were written from a template. The repeated appearance of specific words, phrases and structures in AI-generated copy can also make it appear as though the copy is written from a template. Because of this, it is important to make sure you edit the copy generated by AI to make it your own.

There is already AI detector software on the market, and the day is likely coming when pages with AI-generated copy will be pushed down in the SERP the way pages with duplicate content are now. Remember that is a tool to augment your writing, not a replacement for it.

If you have any questions about AI or need help on any type of writing project, please respond to this email. Your writer coaches are always here for you.