A free tool that highlights the patterns in your own draft, the tells I cut first, and the Humanizer Skill I run before I publish anything.
Simon Willison built a cliche highlighter that scans text for 38 patterns language models overuse and lights them up right in your draft. It runs entirely in your browser, so nothing you paste gets uploaded anywhere.
Free · no account · runs in your browser
I use AI to write constantly. I just do not publish what it hands me. Paste a draft in, see what lights up, cut the parts that were never yours, and the writing sounds like you again.
These are the highest-signal ones. Almost all of them are a sentence standing in for the sentence you meant to write, so the fix is usually to delete the framing and say the thing.
The 12 that give it away fastest
| The Tell | What It Looks Like | Write This Instead |
|---|---|---|
| "It's not X, it's Y" | "This isn't a tool, it's a system." | Say the claim once. "This is a system." |
| "Here's the thing" | A sentence announcing that the next sentence matters | Delete it and start with the thing |
| "That's the whole point" | A closer insisting the paragraph landed | Cut it. If it landed, it landed |
| "Turns out" | "Turns out nobody reads them." | "Nobody reads them." |
| "No X, no Y" chains | "No fluff, no filler, no fuss." | Pick the one that is true and say it |
| Stacked questions | Two or three questions in a row before any answer | Ask one, then answer it |
| Repeated openers | Three sentences in a row starting with "It" or "You" | Merge them, or change where each one starts |
| Colon into a triple | "You get three things: speed, clarity, control." | Write it as a sentence, or a real list |
| Participle tails | ", highlighting the importance of consistency." | End the sentence at the fact |
| AI vocabulary | delve, tapestry, seamless, myriad, testament | The word you would use out loud |
| Performative honesty | "Let's be honest", "to be clear", "I won't pretend" | Be honest and skip the announcement |
| "It's worth noting" | Hedging in front of a claim worth making | Make the claim |
Two things are not on any list and still give writing away faster than vocabulary does. Every paragraph running the same length, and a piece that never once says something a reader could disagree with.
The checker shows you what is wrong. This fixes it. It runs three passes over a draft: finds every tell and quotes it, rewrites without them, then reports what it changed so you can overrule anything. It will not add facts, pad a thin draft, or swap one cliche for another.
How to set it up. Two ways, both take about a minute.
Removing tells gets you to neutral. Neutral is not you. The step that actually fixes this is feeding the model real samples of your own writing, five or six pieces you were happy with, and telling it what you never say.
Paste those samples in above the skill and it will match your rhythm instead of defaulting to clean. My full walkthrough for that is here.