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 free cliche highlighter that lights up the patterns language models overuse, right in your draft. It launched with 10 and now checks 39, including the tells in Wikipedia’s Signs of AI writing guide. Text you paste is checked in your browser. Only the Load URL button sends a link through an outside reader service.
Free · no account · pasted text stays in your browser
I use AI to write constantly. I just don’t publish what it hands me. Paste a draft in, see what lights up, and cut the parts that were never yours.
These are the highest-signal ones. Almost every one is a sentence standing in for the one 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 aren’t on any list and still give writing away faster than vocabulary does. Every paragraph runs the same length, and the piece never once says something a reader could disagree with.
The checker shows you what’s wrong. This fixes it. First it finds and quotes every tell in your draft. Then it rewrites without them and reports each change, so you can overrule anything. It won’t add facts, pad a thin draft, or swap one cliche for another.
How to set it up. Pick one. Each takes about a minute.
Removing tells gets you to neutral, and neutral still isn’t you. What fixes it is feeding the model five or six pieces of your own writing 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.