A new kind of voice is spreading across the internet. It comes across as confident, insightful, and polished—yet built on carefully crafted meaningless prose filled with dramatic flair. You’ll find it in press releases, social media posts, and even student essays. This amateurish style, which is surprisingly easy to identify, has a number of distinct markers that, once you know them, will change how you read online content. I call it The TED-talk style.

The TED-talk style is designed to generate engagement, create drama, and deliver catchy lines that almost sound insightful—but rarely are. Once you know what to listen for, the signs of AI-generated writing become obvious. Based on my own informal observations, I’ve noticed these same patterns in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Grok. Of course, any human writer could display one or two of these habits, but there are so many telltale signs that spotting them becomes second nature.

Here’s an example from a Substack post by a well-known marketing influencer with tens of thousands of followers, which landed in my inbox on Monday. The topic is AI—and it’s clearly written by AI. To be fair, only the first ten examples come directly from his newsletter.

Let’s take a look at some of the most common tells. Starting with the most irritating one.

Contrastive Rhetorical Framing

“So Amazon isn't just buying content. They're buying credibility.”

“This isn't just about revenue diversification. It's about survival.”

“Quality journalism isn't just surviving the AI revolution—it's becoming the premium product that differentiates good AI from bad AI.”

**Asking and Answering Rhetorical Questions**

This stylistic habit has long been associated with poorly written high school essays. Why begin a thought with a question? In a TED talk, it adds drama—but in a social media post, it feels forced. For real understanding, context matters as much as content. ChatGPT can’t distinguish between the two.

“Financial terms? Undisclosed.”

“What changed? The math did.”

“Why? Because human credibility matters.”

**Overuse of Dashes – With No Real Purpose**

ChatGPT prefers dashes—over commas. This is perhaps the easiest tell to spot.

“Amazon can now feed Times articles—plus content from NYT Cooking and The Athletic—directly into Alexa and their AI models.”

“The old model—hire more writers to chase more pageviews to sell more ads—is breaking down in real time.”

Other red flags to watch out for:

Triplet Framing

“Fast, cheap, and out of control.” Catchy alliteration set to a bosa nova rhythm.

Triples give writing a sense of rhythm, cleverness, and authority. They’re often marked by alliteration. While not inherently wrong, AI uses them excessively to close paragraphs with an air of confidence.

“Not for advertising. Not for distribution. For AI training.”

**The Inspirational Pivot** – Just as easy to detect as contrastive framing. Example: “This isn’t just about AI. It’s about humanity.” This rhetorical trick elevates tech talk into TED territory by shifting from specific to abstract, creating the illusion of depth.

Universal Authority Without Source – Example: “Studies show that storytelling is 22 times more memorable than facts.” Which studies? From where? This technique disguises opinion as fact. Among AI tools, Perplexity does a better job than ChatGPT by citing sources.

Quotes without Attribution – “AI is the new electricity,” said Musk. Really? I asked the bot. When and where did he say this? Upon further questioning, ChatGPT admitted it made up the quote and offered to search for authentic ones. This is where many students get caught—lacking the critical thinking skills to question the AI’s output.

Writers (and student writers) fall into these traps because they’re human. A student might not recognize the problem—if it sounds good, it must be good. Professional writers (not me!) may get lazy and accept AI-generated slop. You’ve written two stories, lunchtime rolls around, you glance at the AI-written text, shrug, and say “good enough”—even though closer inspection reveals otherwise.

Since its launch over two years ago, ChatGPT’s biggest flaw has been delivering verbose, bloated, and empty paragraphs. After the March 2025 update, the number of meaningless sentences dropped—only to be replaced by this distinct TED-talk rhetorical style, now infecting every model due to ongoing cross-training on each other’s outputs.

A great TED talk is meaningful, original, engaging, persuasive, and dramatic. Out of context, this style becomes a parody of itself. As author William Faulkner once wrote, it’s “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

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