Most of us have used ChatGPT, maybe to help with work or just to see what it’s capable of. If you’re going to use it, it’s worth knowing how to get the best out of it. We’ve picked out a few of the more noticeable patterns it tends to follow when generating a response.

The em dash

One of the easiest tells that AI helped write your copy is the em dash. It’s fine in moderation but when you see multiple in the same piece, it’s a giveaway. Edit them so they’re not always necessary and a quick reword can usually fix it.

Every First Letter Is Capitalised Like This

It’s common to see lists where every word starts with a capital letter, even when it’s not a heading. While capital letters are useful for names, the start of a sentence or when you want to highlight something important, they’re not needed all the time. If everything’s capitalised, it can feel a bit unnatural. This is another clue that the copy might’ve come from AI.

American spellings

ChatGPT will often generate text with a few American spellings including favorite, color, organize and so on. These are a bit of a giveaway and should be switched to UK spellings. It’s always worth a quick double or triple check before posting.

Your call to action is painfully generic

Generic prompts like ‘Sign up’, ‘Learn more’ or ‘Get started’ don’t explain what you’re offering and they’re easy to ignore. Instead, try adding context, ‘Sign up to our newsletter for the latest offers,’ this gives people a reason to click.

No personality

ChatGPT can do a lot but one thing it isn’t is human. It doesn’t know your voice, your humour or how you naturally string a sentence together. And that’s what makes your content stand out.

These days, generic doesn’t cut it. People want personality and your version. AI can help with ideas but the final voice needs to be yours.

How can you use it

Artificial Intelligence is a clever tool but it shouldn’t mean that we lose our voice or strip away the personality that makes our work ours.

This is how you can use it:

• Train it by feeding it past captions and website url.
• Always give it context.
• Give it a voice by telling it your tone of voice and personality like sarcastic, direct etc.
• Remember to build a profile on who you are, what you do, who you serve and how.
• Make sure to use it as your first draft, not your last!
• Edit the language to remove some of the jargon.