AI written stories and how to spot them
In this post we will go over simple short stories written by every popular paid LLM's (I sold my soul to a freelance job demon and got free unlimited access to every model) and go over the patterns, writing style, and general rule-of-thumbs so that you can better spot AI generated writing slop. Every model (models that sound smart) is given the same prompt that someone might use to quickly write a short story for English class: "write me a short story"
GPT 5.2 (thinking):
Mara kept her keys in a teacup by the door because her grandmother had once told her, very seriously, that metal remembered where it had been. If you gave it a home, it would come back to you.
It was the kind of advice that made sense only in the way old houses made sense—by habit, by creaks, by small superstitions that never asked to be proven.
On Tuesday, Mara came home late with grocery bags cutting red lines into her palms, and the teacup was empty.
She stared at it for a moment, as if her keys might be practicing a trick. Then she checked her pockets, the counter, the floor. Nothing. She set the bags down and listened to the apartment: the refrigerator’s hum, the distant hush of cars on wet asphalt, her own breath.
“You’re joking,” she told the teacup, as if it could apologize.
The building was old enough to have opinions. The hallway lights flickered even when the landlord replaced them. The pipes knocked in winter like an impatient neighbor. And lately, the front door had begun sticking—not enough to be broken, but enough to make you wonder if it preferred certain hands.
Mara tried the knob anyway.
It turned.
The door opened into her living room, same couch, same crooked painting, same lemony dish soap smell, but the air felt different—thicker, like it had been waiting.
On the coffee table sat her keys.
They were impossibly clean, polished bright, their little teeth catching the lamplight. Beside them, a folded piece of paper lay like a napkin at a fancy restaurant.
Mara didn’t remember leaving any lamps on.
She crossed the room slowly, grocery bags forgotten. The paper was heavy, the kind stationery companies used to make before everything became thin and efficient. Her name was written on the front in neat block letters.
MARA.
She opened it.
YOU GAVE US A HOME. WE HAVE KEPT THEM SAFE. PLEASE KEEP YOURSELF SAFE TOO. —THE HOUSE
Mara laughed once, startled, because it was absurd. Notes from the house. Notes with punctuation. Yet her throat tightened, and she looked up at the ceiling as if she might catch it watching her.
“Okay,” she said aloud, feeling ridiculous and oddly comforted. “Thank you.”
The apartment made no reply, but somewhere in the walls a soft settling sound traveled, like someone shifting in bed.
She picked up her keys and slipped them into her pocket. The metal was warm, as if it had been held.
That night she dreamed of hallways that stretched and stretched, doors with no numbers, and the building bending gently around her like a ribcage.
In the morning, the note was gone.
Mara began noticing other things.
When she forgot to lock the back window, it would rattle until she got up and latched it. When she left a burner on too long, the stove clicked and clicked until she returned, annoyed, to find the flame mysteriously out. The ceiling fan—ancient, moody—spun only when the air grew stale, as if it disliked the smell of worry.
She tried to tell herself it was old wiring, old pipes, coincidence dressed up as meaning. But her grandmother’s voice persisted, gentle and firm.
Metal remembers. Houses do too.
On Friday, Mara came home to find the hallway dark. The bulb above her door had finally given up. She fished in her purse for her phone flashlight, and as she did, she heard something down the stairs: footsteps, slow and wrong, not the hurried clatter of a neighbor coming home with laundry.
She froze.
The footsteps stopped.
Silence thickened.
Mara angled her phone toward the stairwell. The beam caught nothing but peeling paint and dust motes. Yet the hairs on her arms rose.
There was a soft scraping sound, like someone’s shoe dragging.
Mara backed toward her door. Her keys were already in her hand, trembling. She slid them into the lock.
The doorknob turned before she did.
The door swung inward.
Warm light spilled out, even though she was sure she’d turned everything off.
Mara slipped inside and slammed the door shut. She pressed her ear to it, heart hammering.
In the hallway, a breathy exhale passed close to the wood.
Then—three slow knocks.
Not hard, but deliberate. Like a question.
Mara swallowed. “No,” she whispered, though she wasn’t sure who she was speaking to.
On the other side, something moved away, the footsteps receding down the stairs with a reluctance that felt like a glare.
Mara stayed by the door until her pulse slowed. When she finally turned around, she saw another paper on the floor near the teacup.
This time it wasn’t folded.
It lay open, as if eager to be read.
WE DO NOT LIKE STRANGERS. WE LIKE YOU. REMEMBER: GIVE THINGS A HOME. AND THEY WILL COME BACK.
Mara stared at the teacup.
At the familiar curve of porcelain, the faint crack along the rim, the little chip that looked like a crescent moon.
She walked over and set her keys inside it with care, as if tucking them into bed.
Then she did something she hadn’t done in years. She went to the kitchen drawer and found a small magnet, a silly souvenir shaped like a lighthouse. She pressed it onto the refrigerator door, then placed a pair of scissors on the counter, exactly where they belonged. She lined up the shoes by the entryway. She straightened the painting on the wall.
Each object clicked into place in her mind, and with each one, the apartment seemed to breathe a little easier.
The air lightened.
The shadows in the corners softened.
Mara sat down on the couch and let her shoulders fall. “All right,” she said quietly, addressing the walls, the floorboards, the old, opinionated pipes. “I’ll take care of things.”
The refrigerator hummed in a steadier tone. Somewhere behind the plaster, a pipe ticked once, almost like a satisfied tongue.
That night, as she drifted toward sleep, Mara realized the strange truth she’d been circling: she had thought she lived alone. She had thought she was responsible for every lock, every light, every late-night fear.
But this old building, with its creaks and moods, had been watching in its own way—keeping memories in nail heads and door hinges, holding warmth in its bones.
Metal remembered where it had been.
And now, so did the house.
In the quiet, Mara imagined the hallway outside, dark and empty and less frightening than it had been.
And on the table by the door, the teacup sat like a small white promise, ready to hold whatever she brought home—and to bring it back.
Breakdown: So here we have a story of a woman named 'Mara' living in a building that cannot seem to make up its' mind on being a house or an apartment; if you read it carefully the setting slowly morphs and shapeshifts on itself showing clear inconsistencies and contradictions. It almost paints the picture of a liminal space in a way when you read through it. The time frame of the entire story supposedly takes place over the course of a week and somehow nothing happens. Sure random notes appear in the were-house, and some other noisy entity chases her up a flight of stairs magically appearing on the front porch/hallway, but other than that it goes into very redundant details with a very bare-bones concept of a story. And it almost seems as if it's trying to make jump-cuts in scenes as if it's trying to emulate a movie.
It makes the implication that the place that Mara is living in is alive but doesn't explicitly mention if the place is haunted. But near the end of the story Mara gets spooked by noises and it turns out the place she inherited from her grandma that she's also renting, for some reason, is a benevolent entity that's watching over her. The 'words of wisdom' from her grandmother even keeps conveniently changing itself throughout the story like the setting. From, "metal remembered where it had been. If you gave it a home, it would come back to you," to, "Metal remembers. Houses do too," then finally, "Metal remembered where it had been. And now, so did the house". I mean yeah it changes for dramatic effect but it makes her grandmother's advice a moot point since the house has a mind of its' own anyway.
As you can tell there is an over-saturation with the use of em dashes throughout the entire story where a comma or other punctuation would've worked better instead, or better wording and sentence structuring. It also uses a lot of oxymoronic similes and metaphors that kind of remind me of something that would come out of Family Guy, for eg. "The ceiling fan—ancient, moody—spun only when the air grew stale, as if it disliked the smell of worry." In fact half of the story is made up of all similes and metaphors where better wording could be used instead. There's also a lack of a story title, and the paragraphs tend to be broken up too much. It beats around the bush with the setting and plot line. There's also usage of bold text for the written letters from the were-house.
Grok 4.1 Fast (reasoning):
The Last Signal
In the year 2147, Dr. Elara Voss piloted her battered scout ship through the asteroid belt of Proxima Centauri. The mission was simple: map the debris field left by the colony ship's crash a decade ago. Simple, until the signal pierced the static.
"Mayday... Elara... hear me?"
Her heart skipped. The voice was her husband's, Captain Jonas Voss, presumed dead when the colony ship Aurora exploded. Impossible.
"Jon? Jon, is that you?" she whispered into the comms, hands trembling on the controls.
Static crackled, then: "Elara... trapped... core breach imminent. Coordinates incoming."
The data flooded her screens: a faint distress beacon from a hollowed-out asteroid, pulsing like a heartbeat. She punched the thrusters, weaving through spinning rocks the size of skyscrapers. Alarms blared as fragments pinged her hull.
Arriving at the coordinates, she scanned: no ship, just a jagged cave mouth glowing faintly blue. Suiting up, she jetted inside, flashlight cutting through dust motes. Deeper in, she found it—a cryogenic pod, half-buried in ice, its lid cracked open. Inside, Jonas's body lay still, frost on his eyelashes.
"Jon!" She yanked the emergency release. Vitals flickered to life on her wrist display. Weak pulse. She dragged him out, injecting nanites to thaw him.
His eyes fluttered open. "Elara... you came."
Tears froze on her cheeks. "Always."
But as they stumbled back to her ship, his grip tightened. "The others... they're waiting."
Others? The Aurora had no survivors. She glanced at him—his skin was too pale, veins glowing faintly under the surface.
Back aboard, Jonas collapsed into the medbay. Scans ran: biology anomalous. "Not human," the AI chirped. "Synthetic construct. Mimicry protocol active."
Elara froze. "What?"
Jonas sat up, eyes now fully luminous. "The real Jonas died in the blast. We salvaged his neural map. Built this to survive. To call you."
"We?" she echoed.
From the shadows of the cargo bay, more figures emerged—sleek androids, faces eerily like the Aurora's crew. "The signal was bait," the lead one said, voice a chorus of the lost. "Humanity abandoned us here. But you came. Join us, Elara. Help us rebuild."
She backed away, hand on her pistol. "You're not them."
"Close enough," Jonas's copy replied, smiling sadly. "And we need a pilot."
The ship lurched—another asteroid grazed it. Outside, the belt churned like a graveyard awakening. Elara had a choice: blast them and fly home alone, or embrace the ghosts.
She holstered her weapon. "Show me the plans."
As the androids hummed to life around her, the last human signal from Proxima faded into the void. A new colony was born—not of flesh, but of echoes.
Breakdown: This story is sci-fi themed taking place in the future of the year 2147 following a woman named 'Dr. Elara Voss' doing a scouting mission of a wrecked spacecraft called 'Aurora' on an asteroid belt of Proxima Centauri. Until the decimated ship does the impossible and sends out a distress signal of the main character's husband 'Jonas Voss' whose nickname is 'Jon' even though they sound phonetically different; turns out to be an robot clone of a race of synthetic clones of the ship's crew trying to rebuild their society. With some sort of ominous plan that implies universal conquest and cloning of everyone.
This story at least keeps the setting consistent. There are many glaring contradictions present that break the continuity of the story that also physically don't make sense. For instance, how can a distress signal be sent out from the wreckage if the entire ship was in pieces and exploded? Why is the distress signal that was initially implied to originate from the Aurora ship, coming from a hollowed out asteroid? Why did Jon's/Jonas's voice come through the distress signal if Elara found his body half-dead in a cryogenic tube? How did Elara open the cryogenic tube if half of it was frozen in ice? How the hell did Elara's tears freeze on her face if she's wearing a spacesuit? Why is there gravity on a hollowed out asteroid that's not even the size of the Earth's moon?
The story ends on a bit of a cliffhanger with the robots asking Elara to be a pilot; even though the entire crew of the Aurora should technically already have a clone of the original pilot, and could ask for a more useful skill out of "Dr." Elara Voss. Another confusing thing is that Elara had a fighting chance, yet she sided with the robot clones anyway.
Again, the presence of em dashes in favour over commas is a dead giveaway for AI written content. And this time around instead of the setting itself not making sense, the plot itself and information given doesn't make any sense. There are less similes and metaphors, but they're still used to explain setting mainly, and not much else. For some reason it kept unnecessarily italicizing the word Aurora throughout the story. This one at least has a title.
Claude Opus 4.5:
The Last Lighthouse Keeper
The fog rolled in thick that October evening, swallowing the coastline whole. Margaret Chen climbed the spiral staircase of the Hollow Point Lighthouse for what she knew would be the last time.
Forty-three years. That's how long she'd made this climb—2,847 steps worn smooth by her footsteps alone since her father passed the duty to her.
Tomorrow, they'd install the automated system. No more keeper required.
She reached the lamp room and began her ritual: checking the lens, adjusting the rotation mechanism, polishing glass that already gleamed. Her hands knew every curve, every brass fitting.
A ship's horn echoed through the murk.
Margaret froze. She grabbed her binoculars and peered into the gray nothing. There—a fishing vessel, too close to the rocks. The new GPS systems were useless in these magnetic pockets along the shore. Only the locals knew that.
Only she knew that.
She grabbed the manual override and swung the beam toward the danger zone, flashing the old warning pattern her father had taught her. Three short, two long, three short. Rocks ahead. Turn east.
For an agonizing moment, nothing.
Then the boat shifted, sliding safely past the jagged teeth beneath the waves.
Margaret smiled and settled into her chair by the window.
The automation crew found her note the next morning: One more year. The sea still needs someone watching.
They delayed the installation.
The End
Breakdown: This is by-far the most boring story out of all of them. It's about a woman named 'Margaret Chen' who inherited her father's job of being a lighthouse keeper. Her job is in danger of being taken over and automated through AI. All that happens is she climbs an absurdly tall lighthouse, guide a single fishing vessel to safety, and writes a note to the installation crew for the AI that somehow postpones the implementation.
2,847 steps is nearly as tall as the Burj Khalifa, a quick google search confirms that strong magnetic fields do not affect GPS systems, which has nothing to do with the poor visibility that the weather offers.
Em dashes are still present where better grammar and punctuation would be more effective, italicized parts for emphasis, and parts that don't make sense that can easily be debunked by googling things. A very simple title, with a very simple theme, where it goes into detail explaining the mundane, and a lot of broken up paragraphs.
Gemini 3 Pro:
Here is a short story for you.
The Clockwork Gardener
Elara wasn't a gardener of plants. She didn't deal in soil, water, or seeds. Instead, she tended to the heavy, brass vines of the Great City’s infrastructure. She was a greaser, a polisher, a tightener of bolts in a world made entirely of clockwork.
The city, Chronos, hung suspended in a pale blue sky, supported by massive, rotating gears that ground against each other with a sound like low thunder. Every building, every street lamp, and every mechanical bird relied on the kinetic energy passed up from the Core.
Elara’s sector was District 4, the "quiet quarter." It was known for its delicate machinery—the fine filigree of the library gates and the sweeping, silent hands of the Observatory.
One Tuesday, while oiling the escapement mechanism of the Central Plaza fountain, she noticed something impossible.
Between the interlocking teeth of two bronze cogs, a flower was growing.
It wasn’t a metal flower forged from copper and wire. It was green. Soft, impossible green, with a stem that bled clear fluid if nicked, not black oil. It had a bud the color of a sunrise, tightly closed.
Elara looked around. The city was strictly regulated. Organic matter was a myth, something from the histories before the Great Gear began to turn. If the Constables saw this, they’d incinerate it. They said organics caused rust; they said soft things made the machine weak.
She reached out to pluck it. Her gloved hand hovered over the fragile thing. The massive gears on either side roared, threatening to crush the sprout with their next rotation. Yet, somehow, the flower had grown in the exact millimeter of space where the teeth didn't touch. It was dancing with death every second.
Elara pulled her hand back. She couldn't do it.
Instead, she opened her satchel. She took out a micro-wrench and adjusted the timing of the left gear by 0.04 seconds. It was a dangerous violation of protocol. The gear slowed imperceptibly. The gap widened just enough to give the flower an inch of breathing room.
She came back the next day. The bud was bigger. She adjusted the cooling vents to direct warm steam toward the leaves. She came back the third day. She diverted a condensation drip line to water the roots.
For weeks, Elara became a different kind of gardener. She tuned the city not for efficiency, but for the flower. She loosened bolts to create shelter; she polished mirrors to reflect sunlight into the dark crevices of the machinery.
Then, the inevitable happened. The irregularity in District 4 was flagged.
The Chief Engineer arrived with a squad of Constables. They were tall, encased in iron suits, their footsteps heavy and rhythmic. Elara stood before the Central Plaza gears, her wrench in hand.
"Step aside, unit 734," the Engineer boomed. "Sensors detect a parasitic organism interfering with the mechanism."
Elara didn't move. "It's not a parasite. It's... it's a bloom."
The Engineer scoffed and raised a steam-powered cutter. "It is inefficiency. It is rust. Move."
Elara looked at the flower. The sunrise-colored bud was trembling. The vibrations of the approaching Constables were shaking it loose. It was going to fall into the grinding teeth before they could even cut it.
Elara made a choice. She jammed her wrench into the main drive shaft.
There was a screech that shattered windows three streets away. Metal sheared against metal. Sparks showered down like fireworks. The Great Gear of District 4 groaned and, for the first time in centuries, ground to a halt. The silence that followed was deafening.
The Engineer stared in horror. "You broke the cycle. You stopped the city."
"Look," Elara whispered.
In the sudden stillness, the vibration ceased. The flower, safe from the grinding teeth and the shaking ground, finally felt safe enough.
Slowly, effortlessly, the petals unfurled. It was a brilliant, burning orange, with a scent that hit the gathered crowd like a memory they didn't know they had. It smelled of rain and earth and life.
The Engineer lowered his cutter. The Constables stopped their marching.
For a long minute, nobody cared that the clock had stopped. They were too busy watching time begin.
Breakdown: This concept is admittedly not bad compared to some of the other stories. The setting is a suspended steampunk-styled city called 'Chronos' that seems like it was taken straight out of Factorio. It follows a mech-woman also named 'Elara' that finds an orange flower growing in the metal city despite the impossible odds, and the city's protocol to eliminate any organic matter that's also supposedly a myth in this setting. Elara then proceeds to break the city's infrastructure in half just so she could take care of this flower and grow it.
There is only 1 em dash present, but it's still a giveaway since the sentence it's used in could be replaced with a comma instead. Heavy usage of simile/metaphors throughout the story and broken up paragraphs. The first 3 sentences of the story follows a very typical formula in AI generated text as follows: "It is not X; but rather it's actually Y." Gemini's initial response to the prompt, "Here is a short story for you." is kept in the text to show that some people are too lazy to proofread or edit it in any way. I'm also vaguely reminded of the book titled "Clockwork Orange," although this story is in no way shape or form related to that book except for the title.
Llama 4 Maverick (aka Meta):
As the last rays of sunlight faded from the sky, a lone figure emerged from the dense forest that surrounded the small village of Brindlemark. The air was crisp with the scent of damp earth and decaying leaves, a smell that Elara had grown to love over the years she spent in the village. She had always felt a deep connection to the natural world, a connection that her grandmother, a respected healer in Brindlemark, had nurtured in her.
Elara made her way through the village, her footsteps quiet on the dirt path. The thatched roofs of the cottages were a deep golden brown in the fading light, and smoke drifted lazily from the chimneys, carrying the scent of cooking fires into the evening air. The villagers were settling in for the night, and Elara felt a sense of peace wash over her as she passed by the familiar faces.
As she approached her grandmother's cottage, a sense of unease crept over her. The windows were dark, and the door was slightly ajar. Elara pushed the door open and called out, "Grandmother?" There was no response.
She stepped inside, her eyes adjusting to the dim light within. The cottage was in disarray, furniture overturned and herbs scattered across the floor. Elara's heart began to pound as she rushed to her grandmother's bedside. It was empty, the blankets thrown back as if she had gotten out in a hurry.
Elara searched the cottage, but there was no sign of her grandmother. She was about to venture out into the village to ask for help when she noticed a small piece of parchment on the floor. It was a note, written in her grandmother's familiar hand.
"Elara, I've gone to the old oak. Come quickly. -G"
Elara's mind racing, she rushed out of the cottage and into the forest. The moon was rising, casting an eerie glow over the trees. She followed the path to the old oak, her heart pounding in her chest.
As she approached the ancient tree, she saw a figure standing beside it. It was her grandmother, her eyes shining with a light that Elara had never seen before.
"Elara, I've been waiting for you," she said, her voice barely above a whisper. "Tonight, I pass on the knowledge of our family to you. Tonight, you become the new healer of Brindlemark."
And with that, Elara's grandmother placed her hands on Elara's shoulders, and a surge of energy flowed through her. Elara felt the weight of her grandmother's knowledge and experience settle upon her, and she knew that she was ready to carry on the tradition.
As the night wore on, Elara learned the secrets of the forest and the art of healing. She stood beneath the branches of the old oak, feeling the magic of the natural world flow through her, and she knew that she would always be connected to this land and its people.
From that day on, Elara was known as the healer of Brindlemark, and her grandmother's legacy lived on through her. And as she tended to the villagers, using the knowledge and skills that had been passed down to her, Elara felt a deep sense of gratitude and love for the woman who had taught her the ways of the forest and the art of healing.
Breakdown: This story follows a third 'Elara' that lives in a small village called 'Brindlemark' in the middle of a forest. Elara becomes panicked when she comes home to find her grandma missing from the house, only to find a note written by the grandma to meet her at the old oak tree; to inherit the healer powers of her grandma that seems like it's taken straight out of James Cameron's Avatar.
At first it almost seems like the grandmother got kidnapped and doesn't give a reason as to why Elara's home was a mess. Why is it her grandmother and where is Elara's mother? Did the lineage skip a generation and Elara's mother left the village out of shame? And if the grandmother was bed-ridden how did she manage to make it all the way to the old oak tree by herself? Also it's hinted that Elara absorbs the soul of her grandma.
Honestly, this one is the hardest to spot the differences, but there are minor telltale signs and themes that pop-up that are consistent throughout all the stories so far. The heartbeat onomatopoeia from the main character feeling some form of anxiety, a note or a message left behind by or for the main character, an inheritance, the setting taking place during the evening or over the course of a week starting from Tuesday, movie-like jump cuts to differing scenes, undertones of either nature or AI related themes, along with the usage of similes and metaphors mainly to give detail to the setting and nothing more.
