AI Words to Avoid (and What to Write Instead)

By Frederik Baun, conversion copywriter and founder of Words Sounds Visuals

I edit somewhere north of a hundred client drafts a month and built a free tool that automates this exact check after doing it by hand for years.

The Vocabulary Graveyard

AI slop vocabulary is a small, repeating set of words a model reaches for at any given opportunity. They’re statistically safe, they sound impressive, and they say almost nothing.

Below is the graveyard, but the list is by no means exhaustive. I add new corpses to the pile every month, but these are the ones doing the most damage right now.

That’s 17 words. Cut these AI words to avoid sounding like everyone else.

Replace nothing when you cut them, and most of your sentences will get stronger, because a real sentence doesn’t need the padding.

What Words Are Overused in AI Writing?

The words above are the obvious tier, and any decent checklist catches them. The second tier is sneakier, because it hides in phrasing instead of vocabulary.

Take the opener nobody says out loud to a friend. The “fast-paced world” one infuriates me particularly, because I once watched it survive three rounds of edits on a client’s homepage. It’s the written version of clearing your throat before saying nothing.

Or the announcement nobody needed, when something is “worth noting” and the sentence just… notes it. If it was worth saying, you would have just said it.

Or the construction that has become its own fingerprint, “not only X, but also Y,” when real people just say the second thing.

And then there’s the closer that gives away most AI blog posts on sight: “In conclusion.” Nobody concludes anymore. They just stop talking.

None of these are wrong on their own, and English allows all of them. But stack three or four in one post, and a reader’s brain flags it before they can say why.

AI writing usually fails at the pattern level, where 20 sentences in a row are all a little too smooth, in exactly the same places, while no single one of them is technically bad.

What Words Are Flagged for AI?

The short answer is that none of them are flagged individually.

Detection tools and human readers both key off density and rhythm rather than a blocklist. One “leverage” in a 2,000-word post is invisible, but four “leverage”s, two “delve”s, and a “tapestry” in the same piece is a body count.

And the bigger tell is sentence rhythm, which is the part most word lists miss entirely.

AI writing defaults to medium-length sentences with almost no variation. Real writing is jagged. Short sentence. Then a longer one that runs on a little, because that’s how a person thinks out loud when they care about the thing they’re explaining.

And if you’re quick, you’ll have noticed I just demonstrated the pattern while describing it.

So the way out is reading the paragraph out loud and asking whether a person would say it, at that length, in that order. A find-and-replace on 17 words won’t get you there.

Fixing It Without Sounding Like You’re Trying Too Hard

Most people mess this up the same way, and I know because I did it too when I started cleaning up AI drafts.

They run a draft through a detector, get a list of flagged words, and swap each one for a synonym, so “leverage” becomes “utilize” and “delve” becomes “explore.” That fixes nothing. It’s the same corpse wearing a different word.

Here is the three-step version I run on every client draft instead.

First, cut the word instead of replacing it. Most slop vocabulary is pure padding, and “leverage our robust platform” is just “use our platform” wearing a costume, so cut the costume.

Second, get specific where the AI got vague. “Elevate your marketing” means nothing, but “cut your cost per lead by 40 percent” means something. The AI reached for “elevate” because it never had the number, and you do.

Third, read it out loud. If it would get you a weird look at a bar, it’s not how people talk. This one test catches more slop than any word list, because it catches the rhythm problem underneath the vocabulary problem.

The goal here is writing like a person who had real specifics to share, and I promise your specifics are more interesting than “seamless.”

Three Real Before-and-After Rewrites

Theory only goes so far, so here’s that three-step process applied to the kind of sentences I pull out of client drafts every single week.

Before: “We leverage a robust suite of tools to deliver a seamless client experience.”

A version of this sentence was sitting on the homepage of an agency owner I worked with earlier this year, and when I asked her what the suite was, she had to go check.

Three graveyard words in a row, and there’s nothing a client could act on.

After: “We use 11 tools to run your launch. You get one dashboard and one point of contact, not 11 logins.”

Same claim, but now it’s a claim a reader can picture.

Before: “Our holistic approach empowers businesses to navigate the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing.”

This sentence packs four graveyard words and delivers zero information, so it could sit on any website in any industry, and nobody would notice it was wrong.

After: “We handle your ads, your emails, and your landing pages, so you’re not stitching together three freelancers who don’t talk to each other.”

The “holistic approach” became three named services, and the “ever-changing landscape” became the actual problem, which is freelancers who don’t coordinate.

Before: “This paradigm shift will elevate the way you approach your content strategy.”

Peak graveyard. Three inflated phrases stacked into 11 words, and still no claim underneath any of them.

After: “You’ll go from posting whatever comes to mind to posting what your last 90 days of data says works.”

The pattern is the same every time: find the vague noun, find the number or the name hiding behind it, and put that in the sentence instead.

Why This Costs You Money

Most people skip past this part, and it’s the reason I bother maintaining a literal graveyard list.

Graveyard words are a trust problem wearing a grammar costume.

A coaching client of mine learned this the expensive way when a prospect told her, on the sales call he almost didn’t book, that her website “read like ChatGPT wrote it” and that he’d nearly closed the tab.

Because a reader scanning your homepage isn’t grading your vocabulary, they’re deciding, within the first few seconds, whether a real person who knows their business wrote this page.

Graveyard words fail that test before the reader even knows why.

“Robust suite” and “seamless experience” could describe a bookkeeping app, a dog-walking service, or a rocket company. Nothing on the page is specific to you, so the reader assumes nobody specific wrote it, closes the tab, and keeps scrolling.

The correction costs nothing but attention. Swap the vague noun for the real one, and the same page starts sounding like someone who has done the work.

I got tired of running this checklist by hand, so I built a free copy cleaner that checks a draft for the graveyard, the rhythm problem, and the padding in one pass.

It saves you the hour it used to cost me per draft, and it will flag things in your writing that you’ve stopped being able to see.

The graveyard list is the vocabulary layer of a bigger check. I run the same drafts through a 25-point editing checklist that also catches sourcing gaps and paragraph density.

If the copy came out of a model in the first place, how to fact-check AI content covers the layer above the words: whether the claims inside them are even true.

The graveyard keeps growing, and so does the crowd of readers who spot it on sight. After 100 drafts a month, I can tell you exactly which side of that divide you want to be on.