AI Writing Tells: Wikipedia's Guide to Spotting Bots

Chen's tool is a "skill file" for Claude Code, Anthropic's terminal-based coding assistant, which involves a Markdown-formatted file that adds a list of written instructions (you can see them here) appended to the prompt fed into the large language model that powers the assistant. Unlike a normal system prompt, for example, the skill information is formatted in a standardized way that Claude models are fine-tuned to interpret with more precision than a plain system prompt. (Custom skills require a paid Claude subscription with code execution turned on.) But as with all AI prompts, language models don't always perfectly follow skill files, so does the Humanizer actually work?

In our limited testing, Chen's skill file made the AI agent's output sound less precise and more casual, but it could have some drawbacks: It won't improve factuality and might harm coding ability. In particular, some of Humanizer's instructions might lead you astray, depending on the task. For example, the Humanizer skill includes this line: "Have opinions.

'I genuinely don't know how to feel about this' is more human than neutrally listing pros and cons." While being imperfect seems human, this kind of advice would probably not do you any favors if you were using Claude to write technical documentation. Even with its drawbacks, it's ironic that one of the web's most referenced rule sets for detecting AI-assisted writing may help some people subvert it. Spotting the Patterns So what does AI writing look like?

The Wikipedia guide is specific with many examples, but we'll give you just one here for brevity's sake. Some chatbots love to pump up their subjects with phrases like "marking a pivotal moment" or "stands as a testament to," according to the guide.