With each new model, artificial intelligence is getting closer and closer to replicating human writing—but it’s not there yet.

Anthropic says its newest model for Claude, Opus 5.5, “communicates more naturally than prior models.” But that revamped communication style comes with its own set of hallmarks, and a new study lays out the writing trends in today’s most advanced AI models.

Researchers at Graphite, a research-based growth agency, compared 10,000 articles generated by Opus 5.5 to 10,000 human-written articles on the same topics. This generated a list of tells, which they define as words, phrases, and patterns that occur at least twice as often in AI writing as in human writing.

Opus 5.5 has fewer tells than previous Opus models, but it still has upwards of 2,500. If you want to keep your writing from sounding AI generated, here are the words and phrases to avoid, according to the study.

Though single words aren’t likely to get your prose pegged as generated by AI, there are still some buzzwords that scream Opus 5.5. Here are the top five culprits, along with their frequency compared with usage in human writing.

When it comes to two-word phrases, Opus 5.5’s common function of breaking down concepts becomes especially clear.

The top tells in this category appear infinitely more times in AI writing than in human-written content, meaning that while Opus 5.5 used these phrases hundreds of times, humans didn’t employ them even once.

5 employed more often than humans. The most pronounced among them included significantly greater lexical diversity, longer words, formulaic closes, higher word counts, and increased use of commas.

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