Neuromarkers in texts and How to Avoid Them

“Why make life harder for yourself when AI is already smart enough? I’ll just write the text using ChatGPT—no one will notice.”

That’s what many people think, and then they wonder why their website ranks last in search results and why their social media posts are liked only by them and their best friend. Neural networks have indeed gotten smarter, but so have search engines.

Of course, you can—and even should—use AI in your work, because it’s been said time and again that professionals who know how to work with it will be prioritized. But that doesn’t mean you should turn a bot into a full-fledged company employee who completely replaces a human. 

It’s important to know how to use it properly and to ensure that the text doesn’t contain any neuromarkers, which we’ll discuss today.

In this article, we’ll break down what neuromarkers (or neurostamps) are, how to avoid them, and which services can help you with this.

Neuro-markers in texts: what they are and how to avoid them

Neuro-markers are textual constructs and phrasing generated by artificial intelligence. It is precisely these that allow search engines to recognize that content has been generated by AI. Many people ignore this and either don’t check their bot’s output at all or believe that the bot wrote the article in a very human-like way and that it doesn’t need any additional edits. 

But both are mistaken and reap the consequences of their own laziness in the form of poor engagement on their posts and low rankings in browser search results. This happens because algorithms do not consider AI-generated content to be high-quality or useful, and human-written content is still heavily favored.

Interestingly, even human-written text can often be perceived as AI-generated. This is quite unfortunate, but keep in mind that it does happen.

Therefore, you should always check your content with AI detectors before publishing. So, especially if you like to use AI when writing, we recommend using these detectors. Our own research has shown that these tools provide the most accurate results, are free, and allow you to check large amounts of text:

• ZeroGPT 
• Copyleaks

Both detectors highlight suspicious phrases, but unfortunately, they often overlook certain aspects. That’s why it’s important to review the text yourself and understand exactly which phrasing could cause your post to fail.

Numerous Contrastive Constructions

Neural networks often use numerous contrasts to “fill space” and explain various terms.

For example:

• “not so much… as…”;
• “what’s important is not…, but…”;
• “it’s not…, but…”;
• “the essence isn’t in…, but in…”;
• and so on.

Comparisons are fine, but not when there are too many of them. Try to use them less often or spread them out throughout the text rather than cramming them all together. 

Using multiple languages

In our opinion, this is a bit strange, because English words in a Ukrainian-language text often sound “cool.” But detectors flag this, so it’s best to either avoid this style altogether or use it much less frequently. To clarify, issues may arise with company names in English or platform names, such as “Facebook.”

What to do?

Try to write without using words from other languages. Replace “Facebook” with the same name in Ukrainian and so on. This will reduce the risk of falling victim to strict algorithms.

Standardized writing style

Neural networks have their own writing style. They prefer a standardized format and explanations that are simple and concise. And often, even your own text can be flagged as generated due to a lack of detail and “vitality.” “But what about the approach of ‘explaining complex things in simple terms’?” you might ask. The thing is, that’s a top-notch approach, but in that case, the text needs to be engaging and, again, “lively.”

What should you do?

Try reviewing the article in sections, and you’ll figure out exactly which part is causing the problem. If the issue really is the writing style, try rewriting the text and adding more non-standard words, such as slang, idioms, and so on. Unfortunately, text that’s too dry can ruin everything (even if you wrote the piece yourself).

Too many punctuation marks

Punctuation marks are, of course, the foundation of high-quality, grammatically correct text, but unfortunately, detectors often interpret them as the “handwriting” of a neural network. (P.S. We still play around with lots of punctuation marks, and, by the way, the detectors react to this just fine. So we wouldn’t say this point equals a 100% risk of getting a bad score, but it’s still worth checking before publishing.)

Which punctuation marks are on the “blacklist”:

• parentheses and quotation marks (our favorite)
• colon (also our favorite)
• currency symbols (surprisingly, yes, detectors don’t really like them)

By the way, we assume you’ve heard enough about the taboo against long dashes. But, surprisingly, detectors almost always handle them just fine.

In Summary

As you can see, AI still can’t replace humans, and we could probably talk about this forever. Use it as an assistant, but always double-check the results of its work. Because often, it’s precisely a lack of attention to the details we mentioned above that prevents your content from reaching its full potential.