The Journey Matters, AI Wouldn’t Know, It Doesn’t Travel

Not for the first time, I have finished reading a report and instead of remembering the message, I am left wondering which AI model wrote it. Fifteen minutes of polished nothing. Like being served a three-course meal made entirely of rice cakes, technically food, but utterly forgettable and lacking any nutritional value for the effort.

So like my therapist would tell me if I bothered to use one, ‘JOURNAL’. I prefer a lite rant in a blog instead.

For professionals and anyone who aspires to be taken seriously, AI augmentation is not a shortcut or a cheat, it is a logical evolution. It offers a powerful way to amplify expertise and confront one of the most pressing challenges of our digital age, that of information saturation.

Every day, we are hit by a firehose of data, facts, opinions and noise. The real value lies not in simply processing it, but in synthesising it through the lens of experience to generate insight, clarity and impact. That is the consultant’s role, to transform raw information into outcomes that deliver contextualised value for clients and protect and maximise the return on one resource we cannot win back, our time.

This cannot be done by blindly relying on AI. Bland automation, no matter how fast or fluent, can and does get things wrong. It hallucinates, it misleads and worse, it makes errors that you run the risk of at your peril that can destroy reputations. When recirculated, AI output without scrutiny becomes fuel for more bad output. One lazy consultant’s copy-paste job becomes another AI model’s disinformation blindly consumed as fact, after all it is just data to a large language model, no judgment.

With AI power comes a professional responsibility, to enrich what you return into circulation with qualified judgement, accuracy and contextual understanding and insights. Clients are not naïve, they know AI is in use. In fact the more evolved will expect it, but they will not tolerate being short-changed by unfiltered, value-free output masquerading as professional insight.

So let’s be clear:

1. Add value — Your judgement, experience, insights and critical (creative even) thinking matter more than ever.
2. Check the facts — AI gets it wrong. Do not let laziness make you look unprofessional.
3. Refine the tone — AI has a tell. Its cadence, structure and surface polish are obvious. Eliminate those tells. Make your output feel like you, not a machine.

So to get the ball rolling, here are some of my AI grammatical call-outs:

• Cambridge Comma’s – How many of you actually use these or even know what they are? AI engines seem to favour their use extensively.
• Coordinating Conjunction –  Whilst not wrong, it has conventionally been used to connect two equal clauses, but modern usage allows them to start a sentence for effect. This has become known as the FANBOYS list: For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So.  In academic and legal writing especially, overuse is often frowned upon so avoiding in professional output is a good rule of thumb.
• A comma or a dash – A quick glance across blogs and LinkedIn posts is showing an increase in the appearance of the ‘dash’ instead of the more conventional comma.
• Double or Single Quotes – AI seems to use the double quotes extensively even where single quotes would grammatically correctly apply.
• Contractions – Considered casual even lazy text, do not use don’t and you should not use shouldn’t … get it?
• Repetitive sentence openers – In longer pieces AI does have a habit of excessive use of topic-support-conclusion patterns, especially in short paragraphs.
• Unnatural Formality – Using ‘Furthermore’, ‘Moreover’, ‘In addition’ more often than a human would.
• Repetition – Lack of variety in synonyms or idioms unless specifically prompted.
• Inline Bold – Emphasising words and phrases inline in BOLD.
• Acronym Expansion – AI either relies solely on acronym’s without correctly expanding the first use or expanding them repeatedly.
• En or Em Dash – Oh yes, this is a dead giveaway only bettered by …
• Daft Icons – When icons like this ✍️ start appearing in text or like this ✅ in tabulated fields, whilst appealing to the magpie DNA in us, they are the ultimate red flag to likely AI output.
• Hyperlinks – If you embed links in your text do check for URL parameters, for example ChatGPT adds the following onto web addresses ‘…./?utm_source=chatgpt.com’.
• Spelling – If your a Brit and you are using AI that is generating US text, do a UK spell check.
• Pronoun and verb Conjugation – Get this right, as in make sure the voice is in the right person ie: the possessive determiner ‘our’ to reflect shared ownership or ‘their’ to indicate the responsibility lies with another etc. An option in report writing, where recommendations and guidance is being given, use of a ‘directive’ turn of phrase is often appropriate. Such consistency can be an issue when merging AI output, especially if your prompting is not disciplined … see next point.
• Prompt Consistency – Your prompting will determine how the AI returns the ‘Grammatical Person’ in text, so ensure you get make your prompting consistent.

This is by no means exhaustive but provides an insight into how you can use the marvels of a word processors Auto Replace and Spell Checker to remove AI fingerprints. Then check how well you have done with the AI Detector at Quilllbot.

There is a reason I have not laid out in black and white the above call-outs and their associated wipe out tricks. If you do not know what they are, go and learn and yes use your AI engine of choice, it will provide an abundance of examples. Now you have NO excuses for outputing documents that read like an automaton.

Why bother? AI generated writing often feels sterile, too clean. Readers come to the end of their journey through a document or blog with the mental equivalent of a spotless windscreen, no smears, no bug splats, no friction. It is like travelling from point A to B in perfect conditions, without ever feeling the air push back. What is missing is the human touch.

Which brings me to my last point, human writing almost always leaves fingerprints, those subtle signs of personality and presence that even a spelling or grammatical checker will not erase. Things like:

• Minor typos or irregular punctuation,
• Quirky phrasing or an idiosyncratic turn of thought,
• Natural variation in sentence length and rhythm.

Reading the unfamiliar writing of someone is a bit like getting into a rental car, it takes a few minutes to adjust, to tune into how it handles, how the gears shift. That is the mental warm-up, the gymnastics of style recognition, where your brain aligns with the writer’s rhythm.

It is why, during document reviews, you can often pinpoint the exact paragraph, if not sentence, where a different person took over or where a shift in tone reveals that parts were written at different times. That subtle inconsistency is not a flaw, it is a human imprint, a sign of lived experience shaped by external influences, capturing the messy, adaptive process that makes us who we are. It is what makes writing feel real.

So get out there and live it, because the journey is where the stories and the depth of insight that builds experience are found, the destination is usually just a brochure with better lighting.