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Flag the words ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini overuse: delve, tapestry, pivotal, leverage, a testament to, and 900+ more. Paste your draft, see every AI-flavoured word highlighted, click any word to swap in the academic alternative, and clean your research paper or essay before a reviewer reads it.
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Any AI-assisted text: a paper section, an essay, a cover letter. Matching runs instantly against the full AI lexicon.
Amber marks are strong AI tells; blue marks are academic words that only matter in density. Hover any flag for the suggested fix.
Click a word to replace it, or fix every safe case at once, then copy the cleaned text to your document.
Strong tells and ordinary academic words are flagged differently, so common scholarly vocabulary is not treated like a red flag.
948 words and phrases from five sources, including the Kobak et al. Science Advances analysis of 15M+ PubMed abstracts.
Click a single word to replace it, or apply every safe fix at once.
A per-1,000-word density metric tells you whether your draft has an AI accent or just a word or two to swap.
Large language models pick every word by probability, and two layers of training skew those probabilities toward the vocabulary this tool flags. The first layer is pretraining: models learn from an enormous corpus in which polished, edited prose (books, journalism, marketing copy) is overrepresented. In that corpus, dramatic verbs and ornamental metaphors are how professional writers signal quality, so the model absorbs delve, tapestry and pivotal as high-value words.
The second layer is reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF, and it is the reason the effect became a fingerprint. After pretraining, the model generates candidate answers and human raters rank which they prefer; a separate reward model learns to predict those rankings, and the language model is then optimized to maximize that predicted approval [Ouyang et al., 2022]. Raters consistently preferred answers that sounded confident, thorough and articulate, and the cheapest way for a model to sound that way is lexical: impressive verbs, emphatic adjectives, tidy signposted transitions. Every round of optimization concentrated more probability on the same small set of rewarded words, a narrowing researchers call mode collapse. That is why every ChatGPT-era model, regardless of vendor, converges on the same voice.
The fingerprint is now measurable at population scale. A 2025 analysis in Science Advances tracked excess vocabulary across more than 15 million PubMed abstracts and found hundreds of words surging after ChatGPT's release, with delve, underscore, meticulous, boast and showcase among the strongest signals [Kobak et al., 2025]. Notably, the trend began before 2022: LLMs did not invent this vocabulary, they amplified it, and now feed it back into human writing as authors unconsciously adopt the style their tools produce. Reviewers and professors read hundreds of manuscripts a year; they recognize the pattern on the first page, and heavily flagged prose gets read with more scrutiny whether or not AI was actually involved.
Everything the tool checks for, compiled from the sources below. Amber entries are strong AI tells; blue entries are legitimate academic words that only read as AI in high density. Take the whole list with you:
The list keeps growing as new analyses are published. Weightings are our editorial judgement; the underlying words are drawn from the references below.
Strip the AI accent from papers, proposals and review responses before supervisors and referees see it.
Clean essays and assignments, and learn which words made the draft sound machine-written in the first place.
Triage a manuscript in seconds: the density score shows instantly whether a text needs a vocabulary pass.
AI suggestions push the same inflated vocabulary at everyone. See which words to swap for plain academic English.
ProofreaderPro's advanced humanizer strips generic AI wording across your whole manuscript and replaces it with the terms academic researchers actually use, sentence by sentence, with tracked changes you can review.
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