If you drafted with AI, your manuscript almost certainly carries habits that make pages read machine-made — and readers are getting quicker at spotting them. The fix is not a full rewrite. It's a targeted cleanup: know the tells, find where they cluster, and rewrite those lines in your own voice.
A tell is a rate, not a single instance. One em-dash is ordinary craft. One sentence fragment is often the most human thing on the page. What reads machine-made is the pile-up: the same constructions, the same rhythms, the same stock phrases recurring page after page at a density no human drafts at. That distinction matters, because the goal of cleanup is to bring the rates down — not to strip every dash and fragment out of your book and your voice with them.
The hard part of doing this by hand is knowing where you stand — which habits, which chapters, how dense. Starport's AI-Tell Cleaner reads the whole manuscript and marks every tell it finds as a comment in your own Word file: the passage, why it reads machine-made, and what you might do about it. It reads by rate, not single instances; it applies only the mechanical fixes that can't touch your voice (every one logged); and it hands you a density report with a per-chapter heatmap so you can see exactly where the patterns cluster. The Deep Edit goes further — model-judged easing of overused punctuation and rewrite suggestions drafted into your margins, each screened so it can't introduce a tell — but nothing changes a word of your prose without your hand on it.
Once the tells are out, the remaining question is whether the prose is good — tight, rhythmic, yours. That's a line edit's job, and the Line Edit measures every change against a Style Sheet built from your own writing, which is exactly what a post-AI manuscript needs.
The Manuscript Scorecard grades your full manuscript on nine craft metrics, benchmarks it against professionally-edited books, and tells you exactly what to fix first. Free, in minutes.
Get your free Manuscript Scorecard →Increasingly, yes — reviewers now name them specifically, and the em-dash pile-up in particular has become widely recognized. The tells read as flat or samey even to readers who can't articulate why.
Amazon KDP asks publishers to declare AI-generated content at upload, and store policies keep evolving — check the current requirements where you publish. Disclosure rules are about generation, not about using AI tools to edit your own writing.
No, and any tool that claims to is overselling. What a good pass gives you is the map — what it found, where it clusters, and why it was flagged — so your own read-through spends its time where it matters most.
Only if you over-correct. Em-dashes, fragments and the occasional bold construction are ordinary craft — the problem is rate, not existence. Fix the pile-ups, keep the voice.