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I’ll Instantly Know A Writer Used ChatGPT When I See This

4 min readJul 7, 2026

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Elderly man sitting at a wooden table, working on a laptop indoors.
A man typing on a laptop. Photo by Helena Lopes from Pexels.

I’ve started noticing the same commenter joining the discussion in hundreds of articles. Since he uses a pseudonym, and I don’t know his actual name, I’ve started referring to him as “AI Detective Dylan” in my head. Every few days, I’ll finish reading an article, scroll down to the comments, and find Dylan explaining why the piece was “obviously written by ChatGPT.”

Whenever I see one of Dylan’s comments, the pattern is usually the same. He regularly breaks down articles sentence by sentence, pointing to phrases, transitions, and word choices he believes reveal AI involvement.

“Once you’ve seen enough AI writing, it becomes easy to spot,” Dylan wrote. “Anyone who disagrees with me is delusional!”

Last month, I watched Dylan accuse one writer of using ChatGPT because the article contained “a few metaphors.” A few days later, I saw he made the same argument under a completely different article written by someone else. Meanwhile, he seemingly ignored writers publishing 100,000 words a day on multiple platforms while somehow keeping up with social media, client work, and full-time jobs.

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Hi, I'm Matt. If you want to read more of my work, get 30 days of premium access to my Substack for free 👇

The Daily Draft
The Daily Draft

Published in The Daily Draft

We publish high-quality pieces about the art of writing. Our aim is to build a community and give upcoming writers a place to have their work professionally edited and published.