When readers say your article looks like it was written by AI: A checklist for Chinese writers to de-AI
In this era of overwhelming generative AI, we only need to enter a few keywords and get an article with a complete structure and smooth sentences in a few seconds.
However, as a creator, have you ever experienced such confusion and loneliness?
You give AI the draft you wrote all night long to polish, and the article it returns to you does become smoother, without even a single typo. But after you read it several times, you feel that the text is extremely cold: your humor, your hesitation, your emotions and temperature are all washed away by the precise calculation of AI.
Over time, we begin to get used to the standard opening provided by AI and the neat and cold paragraph structure. Until one day, a close reader says to you: “This article is very good, but… it looks a bit like it was written by AI.”
At that moment, your heart trembled slightly. Because you know, he’s right.
What we pursue is never to write fast, but to write like ourselves
AI makes writing faster, but the price is that everyone’s articles start to look more and more alike.
It is not difficult to write quickly. What is difficult is that after you finish writing, you can still see your face in the words. I do not reject tools, they are indeed powerful assistants given to us by the times. I also put AI into the entire publishing pipeline, reducing an article from four hours to forty minutes. But we must not gradually forget our own views, positions and depth of thinking while enjoying convenience.
It is worth noting that the market’s appetite is moving in the opposite direction. I mentioned a number in the previous article about the “2026 Creator Economy Report”: more than 75% of the audience believes that pure human creation is becoming a scarce resource with a high premium. When perfection becomes cheap, imperfection becomes the most expensive asset.
In other words, your sentences that are not neat enough, the metaphor that only you can use, and the confession that you hesitated three times before writing are the things that others cannot copy.
In order to help all those who persist in creating and desire to retain the soul in their words, I compiled this “Checklist for Removing AI Taste from Chinese Writing”.
What can this free checklist bring to you?
This isn’t just a PDF, it’s a text amulet that you can print out and stick next to your screen. After you finish writing the first draft, or let AI polish it, quickly review it against it and change it if you find anything:
- 🚫 Disabled sentence patterns and opening remarks: AI starting patterns that can be recognized at a glance will help you completely eliminate routine clichés.
- ✍️ Self-examination of wording and punctuation: Correct the precise use of Taiwanese idioms, full-form punctuation and dashes, and get rid of the machine-like sound and translation accent.
- 🔍 Structural AI taste diagnosis: Find those empty paragraphs that make sense when viewed alone, but have no point when combined, and reconstruct the core skeleton of the article.
- 🧹 Cleaning tool traces before publishing: capture the ironclad evidence and flaws left when copying and pasting, so that the text presents the most professional texture.
- 💡 The key section “What should not be changed”: Read this section before revising, which will help you avoid cutting many of the most sincere and personal sentences.
The last section was made up after I stepped on the pit myself. Too many people interpret de-AI flavoring as making the article more beautiful. As a result, they delete it all the way to the end, leaving a neater but less human-like manuscript. The value of the checklist is not to teach you what to change, but to tell you where not to change in the first place.
(opens in a new tab)
To remove the AI flavor is to remove the part that is the same no matter who writes it.
AI can speak smoothly for you, but it cannot decide what to say for you.
This is why I always think that the difficulty in writing lies not in the writing style. In the past, I divided the most common writing bottlenecks into three types: mediocrity, plainness, and flatness. AI cannot cure any of these three problems, because their root lies in the point of view, not in the sentence. Similarly, AI copywriting is written correctly but without warmth, the problem has never been that there are not enough adjectives.
Therefore, the matter of removing the AI flavor is not a set of rhetorical skills in the final analysis, but a judgment exercise: remove the parts that everyone writes the same, leaving the parts that only you can write like this.
If you also want to keep your own opinions and style in the AI wave and not let the algorithm become the ghostwriter of your thoughts, you are welcome to visit writers.tw (opens in a new tab) now, enter your email to download the “Checklist for Eliminating AI Flavor in Chinese Writing” for free.
👉 Get it now: https://writers.tw/ (opens in a new tab)
Let your words come alive again and find the true temperature that can be heard from your own mouth.
If you want more than a checklist
A checklist can help you keep the human touch in your writing, but it deals with the last mile: the manuscript has been written, and you have to decide what to keep and what to delete.
What really gets many people stuck is actually the earlier steps: where do the questions come from, how do I accumulate materials, and how do I turn an article into an e-newsletter, social post, and course material after I write it, instead of starting over from a blank page every time. I organized this line into a set of production lines that can be operated by myself, and it is also something that I take everyone to actually run through in the workshop.
If you prefer to do it yourself first, I’ve also made the writing discipline into two free tools you can use today that you can use along with this checklist.
When it comes to writing, the more powerful the tool, the more it tests whether you know what you want to say. What this checklist helps you guard is not your writing, but yourself.
Next step
Bring this topic to your team
Vista Cheng speaks and runs workshops on AI workflows, writing and content systems for companies, schools and public agencies.
