The Core Laws
The voice stays yours
A reader who smells the machine discounts the message. Strip the tells and keep your own hand on the final draft.
Machine prose has a smell, and your readers are learning it fast. The em-dash cadence, the not-X-but-Y pivot, the tidy triad, the numbered list where a sentence would do, the eager varnish on every claim. Each tell discounts the words that carry it. A reader who suspects a machine wrote your message stops asking whether it's right and starts asking whether you meant it.
Use the machine for what it's good at, the draft, the structure, the first ninety percent. Then take the voice back: cut, rephrase, break its patterns, restore your own rhythm. The test for anything sent under your name: would the recipient believe you wrote it, and would you stand behind every sentence in it? The higher the stakes, the more of it should be your own hand.
How to practice it
Learn the tells.
Em-dash chains, not-X-but-Y pivots, triads, list-itis, glaze. You can't strip what you can't see; study the smell until it's obvious.
Do the de-AI pass.
A dedicated final read of anything outbound, hunting tells only. It is a different pass from editing for content; do both.
Keep stakes-writing yours.
The apology, the ask, the hard message: machine-draft the skeleton at most. The words that carry risk should be words you chose.
Size it to the reader.
Cut until a tired reader finishes it. Length is the first tell, and nobody ever complained a message was too clear.