Forget lists of words and punctuation marks. If you really want to know if a text was written by AI, look for this particular sentence structure.

What it is is a travesty. That’s a bad sentence. No question. Most editors would recast it as simply “It is a travesty” and not give it another thought. But what if it was in a quotation? Or what if, ...

The length of a sentence isn’t what makes it hard to understand— it’s how long you have to wait for a phrase to be completed. When you’re reading a sentence, you don’t understand it word by word, but ...