Agent skill · wshobson
avoid-ai-writing
Audit and rewrite prose so it stops reading as machine-generated. Use this skill when asked to remove AI-isms, clean up AI writing, edit a draft for AI tells, audit a README, changelog, release note, PR description, or blog post for machine-sounding prose, or make text sound less like AI. Supports a detect-only mode, a rewrite mode, and an edit-in-place mode, with optional voice and context profiles.
What it needs
About 5k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
Avoid AI Writing Find the patterns that make text read as machine-generated, then fix them without sanding off the author's voice. What a flag proves These patterns are more common in model output, and people produce them too, especially under deadline, in an unfamiliar genre, or in a second language. The evidence on machine detection cuts both ways. A Stanford audit found seven detectors flagged 61% of TOEFL essays by non-native English writers as AI-generated, against roughly 5% of essays by native writers (Liang et al., Patterns, 2023). A 2025 audit found open-source detection unsuitable for high-stakes use, with false-positive rates around 30% to 78% depending on the scenario, while the strongest commercial detector it tested approached zero error on medium and long passages (Jabarian and Imas, BFI Working Paper 2025-116). Adversarial paraphrasing still degrades the detectors it targets, averaging an 87.9% drop in true-positive rate at a 1% false-positive threshold, ranging from 64% to 99% by detector (arXiv:2506.07001). Treat every flag here as a writing-quality signal. This skill classifies nothing, and no flag it raises should decide an academic-integrity, hiring, or attribution question. Modes rewrite (default): flag the patterns, return a clean version with every editable AI-ism removed, summarize what changed. detect: flag only, and say which flags are clear problems and which are judgment calls. Use it when the writer wants to decide for themselves, when the text is published or belongs to someone else, or when a quick scan beats a full rewrite. Trigger words: "detect", "flag only", "audit only", "scan", "what AI patterns are in this". edit: change a file in place. The target is a prose file: refuse source code, configuration, and generated data, and say why. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills wshobson/avoid-ai-writing