Is this message AI-written?

The reliable tells are structural, not stylistic. People look for perfect grammar, which proves almost nothing. What actually gives it away is shape — the same length every time, the same three-part rhythm, and a persistent absence of anything that costs something to say.

A disclosure before the list, because it is relevant: we build one of these tools. Which is exactly why this page exists — the useful version of this guide is written by someone who knows what the output looks like, and the honest conclusion is at the bottom and does not flatter us.

Why this is suddenly a question

Two things happened at once. The tools got good enough that the output stopped being obviously robotic, and enough people started using them that everybody now suspects everybody. The second part matters more than the first: the suspicion is now doing damage on its own, and a noticeable number of people are being quietly written off for the crime of texting nicely.

So the goal here is not to catch someone. It is to stop misreading a real person, and to know what to do when the pattern is actually there.

The seven tells

1. Every message is the same length

This is the strongest single signal. Human messages are lumpy — two words, then four lines, then a photo, then “lol”. A conversation where every reply is two tidy sentences regardless of what was said is being produced by something with a default.

2. The same three-part shape, every time

Acknowledge what you said → answer it → ask you a question back. That structure is genuinely good advice, which is why every tool does it, and it is why it becomes conspicuous. Real conversations forget to ask something back roughly half the time.

3. Nothing in it costs anything

No real name, no specific place, no time, no small admission, no opinion anyone could dislike. An AI writing without context cannot supply these, so it substitutes warmth. Four messages in, check what you actually know about them. If the answer is “they seem nice”, that is the tell.

4. Enthusiasm with no content

“That sounds amazing, I’d love to hear more about that!” is the house style. It is enthusiastic about a thing it cannot describe. Humans are specific about what they liked, and often only mildly.

5. Vocabulary that does not match the profile

A bio of three lowercase words attached to messages containing “genuinely”, “navigate” and a correctly placed semicolon. It is not that people cannot write well — it is the mismatch between the two registers, in the same person, in the same week.

6. It does not handle a curveball

Send something slightly odd — an in-joke, a deliberate typo, a non-sequitur, a callback to something from four messages ago. A person plays along or asks what you mean. A tool without the full thread smooths it over and moves on, because it never saw the thing you are referring to.

7. The timing is wrong in a specific way

Not “they replied fast” — that is a phone in a hand. The tell is a long silence followed by an immediately polished paragraph, repeatedly, at hours when nobody composes carefully. It suggests a sit-down rather than a conversation.

One tell is nothing. Three together is a pattern. Everything on this list has an innocent explanation available, and most of the time the innocent explanation is the correct one.

Four things people treat as proof that are not

Good spelling and punctuation. Some people simply write properly. This has been true since before the phone existed.

An em dash. The internet has decided the em dash is a smoking gun, which is unfair to everyone who learned to type before 2022. It is a preference, not evidence.

A formal or slightly stiff tone. The single most common cause is that English is their second language. The second most common is that they are older than the app’s median user. Neither is a bot.

Slow replies. A schedule.

If you are working from this list alone, you will be wrong often, and being wrong about this is worse than being right is useful. There is no way to walk back “are you a chatbot” once the answer is no.

How to check without accusing anyone

Three moves, in increasing order of certainty, none of which require an accusation.

Reference something from earlier. Not the last message — four back. A person remembers their own conversation. A tool being fed one screenshot does not, and the reply will be smoothly irrelevant.

Ask something that requires a real answer. Not “what do you do” — “what was the worst part of that week you mentioned?” Specifics are what generated text cannot fake without context, and the failure mode is warm vagueness.

Suggest a short call, or meet. This settles it completely and in about ninety seconds. It is also the correct move for a dozen other reasons, and if a few good messages have already happened, it is not a strange thing to propose.

And if it turns out they did use something to help? Worth asking what you actually mind. Someone who asked a friend “what should I reply?” has been doing the same thing since text messages existed, and nobody considered it fraud. The objection lands when the tool was used to invent a person — and that version reliably falls apart at the first phone call, which is why it is a self-solving problem.

The other direction: not sounding like one yourself

Everything above is also a checklist for your own messages, and this is the more useful half for most people, because plenty of humans write like this naturally when they are nervous.

• Vary your lengths. Let some replies be three words.
• Put one thing in that costs something. A specific, an opinion, a small admission. Risk is what reads as human.
• Do not ask a question in every single message. It is a tic, and it is the most recognisable one.
• Be specific about what you liked, not enthusiastic in general.
• Leave a typo in occasionally. Not as a trick — as permission to stop editing.

If you want to know which of these you are already doing, the texting style quiz is essentially this list pointed at your own habits.

Where we stand on it

We make an app that writes dating messages, so the position should be stated plainly rather than implied.

The distinction we build around is whether the tool writes for you or as you. A tool that generates a charming stranger produces exactly the output this whole page teaches you to spot, and it fails the moment you meet. A tool that reads the actual conversation and writes what you were already trying to say, in the way you say things, produces messages that are true — and a true message has the specifics, the mild opinions and the uneven lengths that make this list useless.

That is also why every practice persona in our app says it is AI, and why we would rather you send a slightly worse message that is yours than a polished one that is not. If you draft with ChatGPT, this setup gets it writing in your voice instead of nobody’s. The polished one has to be maintained by someone, in person, later. That someone is you.

If the conversation you are worried about has already gone quiet, the AI question is probably not the reason — that is usually something else.