How do you recognise a text written by an AI before you have read it?
What jumps out is not the mistake, it is the pattern: an opening that announces what is about to be said, three paragraphs of the same length, a question at the end, and em dashes everywhere.
Nobody reads three texts all the way through to spot it: the outline is enough, and that is exactly what you see at the top of this page.
This is not a defect in quality, it is how the maths works: a language model produces whatever is most probable, and whatever is most probable has already been written a thousand times over.
Two obvious answers that get you nowhere
Asking the AI to be creativeIt then avoids the most obvious wording and reaches for the second most obvious. The problem has moved, not been solved.
Hoping nobody noticesAn AI does not know what you published last week. It cannot avoid a repetition it cannot see.
How we solved the problem
We stopped asking for variety. We impose it.
We wrote down what a post can say and how it can be written. Two posts in a row never belong to the same family, and no layout comes round twice in succession.
In the rows: what the post says.
In the columns: how it is written.
All in one block
Sentences that get shorter and shorter
A dialogue in two voices
A plain list
and others
A before and after
Week 1
One line of your quote, explained
Week 2
A customer story
Week 3
An objection you hear often
Week 4
A figure from the industry
and others
Four weeks in a row. Never the same row twice, never the same column twice.
Variety alone is not enough: you have to stay recognisable
Variation solves one problem and can create another. If everything changes every time, there is nothing left to recognise you by. So alongside those rules we pin down a short list of things that never change.
What never changesThe pronounA page that says ‘we’ one day and ‘our team’ the next makes you harder to recognise than any stylistic slip.
The subjects we do not coverWhat is not our field, what we have nothing new to say about, and what we do not want to comment on.
The tone we never takeNot preachy, not alarmist, not matey.
The form varies inside the frame. The frame itself does not. That is what AI-assisted content looks like when it does not sound like AI.
The last-five-posts test
Read your last five posts again and look only at the opening lines.
If three of them are the same length and the same shape, you know where to start. It is not the substance that has to change, it is the rule that decides the shape.
What that produces: four businesses
A self-employed electrician
The raw materialAt one customer’s house the RCD tripped once a day, never at the same time. The cause was an immersion heater whose insulation only failed once it was hot. Not a single trip in the eight months since.
With no instructionsIs your RCD tripping all the time? 🤔 You are not alone, faults like this are often hard to track down. At one customer’s house our experienced team found the real cause, and everything has worked since. Sound familiar? Tell us in the comments! 👇
With a set forma case story with one sentence set apart in the middleThe RCD tripped once a day, never at the same time. The kind of fault that never shows itself while somebody is standing there watching for it.
The problem was not the RCD.
It was an immersion heater in the tank whose insulation only failed once the water was hot, so an hour after it switched on. Two hours on site waiting for it to trip. Element replaced. Not a single trip in eight months.
An events studio
The raw materialThe build for a wedding, starting at 6am, 140 covers, 14 tables, 320 candles, seven hours with three people.
With no instructions✨ Another magical day! ✨ A team out at first light, hundreds of candles and so much emotion. Every detail matters to us. Which wedding style do you like best? 💍
With a set forma data sheet and a closing line set apartBuild from 6am. 140 covers, 14 tables, 320 candles, seven hours with three of us.
At 4pm the couple walked in and said ‘lovely’ 🕯
A packaging manufacturer
The raw materialThe price of corrugated board in week 36, up 2.1%, the fifth rise in a row.
With no instructions📈 Board prices keep climbing! Another rise this week, and it is not the first. In a demanding market it is important to stay informed. We will see you through these changes. Get in touch!
With a set forma recurring report that opens with the figure+2.1%.
Corrugated board, week 36. Fifth rise in a row since August.
In concrete terms: a standard case that cost €0.84 at the beginning of June costs €0.92 today. On 5,000 units that is a difference of €400. Not dramatic yet. What is unsettling is how regular it is: nobody can say where it stops.
What we are advising at the moment: group orders quarterly rather than monthly, and check which flute you are using. A lot of cases go out double-wall when single-wall would do.
Every Friday 📦
The bare figure works here because the information stands on its own and comes round every week. On another subject the same firm would publish a long, detailed piece: the form changes, the standard does not.
An estate agency
The raw materialA house on the market for eight months with another agent, fourteen viewings and no offer, mandate taken over, price adjusted, the sale agreement signed three weeks later.
With no instructions🏡 Another lovely sale! A property that had been on the market for months, a price adjustment, and the owners have finally found the right buyer. Our knowledge of the local market makes all the difference. Thinking of selling too? Get in touch! 🔑
With a set forma case story written in one blockWhen the owners gave us the mandate, the house had been for sale for eight months. Fourteen viewings, not one offer. People liked the house every time, and every time they left without getting back in touch. It was not the house. It was the gap between the price and what buyers saw when they walked in. We went over the valuation again with the owners and showed them the four comparable properties sold in the same street over the past year. Sale agreement signed three weeks later, seven thousand euros below the old price.
There is nothing spectacular about this story, and that is exactly what makes it believable. The piece ends with a figure only the agency could know.
What it shows
Look at the four versions written with no instructions: you can swap the name of the business without changing a word. An electrician, a florist, a printer and an estate agency are all writing the same thing.
The other four differ from each other in length, structure and tone. One fits in two lines, another needs four paragraphs. Each one could only have been published by the business it actually happened to.
Resources
These two catalogues list 92 forms a post can take and 61 ways of laying one out. For each entry: its structure, an example, and the conditions under which it fails. These are the two catalogues we work from. We are publishing them unchanged.