Spot the AI Essay: A Glossary of GPT Tells

Over a concentrated stretch of editing work — roughly twenty student essays pushed to me by agencies for pre-submission review, covering everything from US high schools to PhD applications — a pattern emerged that I'd sensed before but could now verify at scale.

More than 80% of the agencies sending this work were using GPT to generate the essays. The cost savings on the back end are obvious. But the gap in execution between agencies is enormous: the ones I already considered weak couldn't even prompt the model effectively; the ones I trusted more produced results that were at least usable.

If I had to tier the outputs:

1. No meaningful prompting, no specificity — classic one-look-GPT, network-novel prose.
2. Some structure given to the model, but thin on detail; monotonous but not empty.
3. A real outline or draft fed in, heavy detail provided, GPT used for polish — quality actually reasonable.

Why these words are a red flag

The word list below comes from two sources. The lowercase entries are words I recalled from memory — terms I kept encountering and found jarring. The capitalised entries came from asking GPT itself: "What high-register words do you tend to use that sound impressive but awkward in context?"

The pattern that unifies them is a kind of omniscience affect — language that reads as though a deity is narrating a college applicant's life. My working theory is that the model ingested enormous amounts of biblical and mythological text, and that vocabulary bleeds into its outputs whenever it reaches for gravitas.

How to use this list

Simple: Ctrl+F the essay you received against this list. Two or three hits and you have a problem. More than that and you're looking at something that either needs to be substantially rewritten or should not be submitted at all.

A practical data point: the same raw material, through a weak agency's GPT process, can produce ten or more of these words in a single essay. Through a good agency's human-led process with AI polish, you'll see zero. The difference between a strong essay and a weak one is sometimes exactly this vocabulary.