9 Most Common AI Writing Mistakes & How You Can Avoid Them

Writing with AI

10 min read

9 Most Common AI Writing Mistakes & How You Can Avoid Them

Get acquainted with the 9 most common mistakes AI makes when helping you with content creation. Learn how each one works, how to avoid them, and how to stay clear of AI detection.

Written by

Kateryna B.

Published on

Jun 24, 2025

Table of contents

Common AI Writing Pitfalls Categorized
Lack of Fact-Checking
Misinterpretation of Information
Repetitive Output
Inability to Recreate Tone
Robotic Language
Unintentional Bias
Lack of Contextual Understanding
Punctuation & Grammatical Errors
Disregard for Instructions
Wrapping Up

Table of contents

Common AI Writing Pitfalls Categorized
Lack of Fact-Checking
Misinterpretation of Information
Repetitive Output
Inability to Recreate Tone
Robotic Language
Unintentional Bias
Lack of Contextual Understanding
Punctuation & Grammatical Errors
Disregard for Instructions
Wrapping Up

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It’s tough for a student to know there’s a tool out there that could virtually solve all their problems yet be unable to use it. But what if you didn’t have to miss out on that opportunity?

To use AI and not get into trouble, you need to be aware of the most common AI writing mistakes. That’s why our StudyPro team has made this article – to list the mistakes AI tends to make and help you avoid them!

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Common AI Writing Pitfalls Categorized

AI writing tools are prone to error, but which errors do they make the most? Knowing about these mistakes is essential if you want to use AI models. After all, these tools will err. You just have to know how to fix AI writing mistakes, so let us help you.

Here are the most frequent mistakes AI makes:

Factual mistakes
Misinterpretation of facts
Repetition
Inability to adapt tone
‘Robotic’ writing
Bias
Lack of nuance
Punctuation & grammar errors
Not following instructions

If you want to know how to use AI to write an essay, the answer is simple: beware of the mistakes AI systems tend to make and learn how to fix them.

Lack of Fact-Checking

One of the most dangerous AI myths in education is that AI tools know what they are writing. Any AI, no matter if it’s paid or free, is a language model. A language model predicts the next word depending on the context. It is unable to critically assess information and draw conclusions. It can only repeat what it’s been taught.

If you want to use an AI model for academic writing, you have to stay on top of these AI hallucinations. Fact-check every citation, reference, date, and figure to ensure they are accurate.

Some people are under the impression that if you give it a prompt that says ‘don’t make mistakes,’ it won’t.

But AI is also notorious for not following instructions and presenting incorrect or outdated information. So, if you’re set on the idea of using AI, you have to do the fact-checking.

Misinterpretation of Information

One of the most common mistakes of AI writing is the lack of contextual accuracy. As we’ve already mentioned, artificial intelligence predicts text rather than creates it. When generating content, it can lose track of its own ‘train of thought,’ not to mention long, complex prompts. Did you ever wonder why it doesn’t follow all your instructions? Maybe the prompt was too long and it simply lost track.

AI lacks the ability to recognize context, something that humans do without noticing. For AI-generated text, that means incorrect or outdated information. To mitigate this, you have to remember about this flaw when designing a prompt and, of course, vigorously fact-check the confusing output.

Repetitive Output

The thing about AI writing is that all these mistakes are connected. The lack of contextual understanding leads AI writing tools to generate text that is riddled with factual inaccuracies, poorly interpreted data, and repetition.

AI doesn’t process text as a whole but in a sequence, sentence after sentence. This refers to both input and output. So, when generating text for you, AI can forget it’s already said something. AI tools could write a book about how to make an essay longer, but would anyone read it?

To prevent your text from sounding repetitive and clearly AI-generated, you need to replace redundant phrases with original thoughts. When revising AI-generated text, ask yourself:

Has that been said before?
How would I phrase that?
Does that sentence add value to the overall content?

Inability to Recreate Tone

You might argue that it’s not true – if you tell AI to be friendly, it will use emojis and exclamation points, and if you tell it to be formal, it will avoid colloquial language and contractions. But AI is not human, hence, it doesn’t actually understand what tone of voice is. It lacks the ability to perceive tone and context.

AI also tends to shift its tone while generating content, again, due to poor understanding. Inconsistent tone is one of those AI writing mistakes that can make your professor suspicious you used outside help.

When generating content with artificial intelligence, determine what tone you want the paper to convey and stick to it. When editing yourself or using editing tools, read the text aloud. This will let you actually hear the shift in tone, making proofreading much easier.

Robotic Language

If you read enough AI-generated content, you will probably be able to notice AI writing when you see it. There are common AI writing mistakes, as well as patterns that it tends to use, which make artificially generated text so glaringly obvious.

Here’s what to look for:

Emotionless text
Overuse of passive voice
Repetition in sentence structure, length, beginnings of sentences/paragraphs
Overused filler and transitional phrases
Fence-sitting
Lack of valuable insights

AI text sounds emotionless because it picks neutral words that end up sounding unnatural in human communication. For example, it tends to use ‘individuals’ instead of ‘people,’ ‘utilize’ instead of ‘use,’ etc.

Generative AI relies on transition words and transition phrases to make the text sound coherent, but the text reads as robotic when transitions are overused.

The same goes for passive voice. ‘Balanced’ language, or fence-sitting, is a tactic used by AI to avoid being wrong or offending anyone. These are not common grammar mistakes per se, but lexical and stylistic ones that can give away an AI-generated text without human oversight.

Unintentional Bias

One of the most common mistakes of AI writing is biased answers. AI writing tools are trained on large datasets collected from books, media, internet, concrete examples, etc. This training data has been collected from humans, who are prone to bias. AI doesn’t have a moral compass and cannot objectively assess information, hence, it cannot avoid prejudice and can mislead readers.

AI can mistake a common misconception for a fact if it’s repeated often enough. It may also present biased information because it was trained on a particular dataset. In simple words, history has been and still is written by white men, and AI only repeats what it sees.

Only thorough proofreading and human oversight can help you ensure that your AI-generated text is objective. Look at plagiarism examples, commonly repeated biases and existing data and review your texts to eliminate those errors.

Lack of Contextual Understanding

AI writing often comes off as shallow and robotic. This is attributed to the fact that AI doesn’t actually understand what it’s writing. AI cannot perceive emotion, meaning, tone of voice and intended message. It only predicts the next most commonly used word.

AI settings predict the output. In the case of large language models like ChatGPT and other most popular tools, they are set to seek middle ground, avoid being controversial and not to offend anyone. However, in text this shows up as a lack of nuance and depth. To produce deep analysis, AI must have an original thought and a moral compass to determine if something is true or not.

Mistakes of AI writing can only be fixed by closely reviewing the output, fact-checking everything, and rewriting the text in your own words.

Punctuation & Grammatical Errors

Grammar mistakes can find their way into your AI-generated text, even though it’s not the most common error. AI writing pitfalls in grammar are tied to the same issues we’ve discussed already – repetition instead of true understanding, mistakes in AI training data, and lags.

AI doesn’t really know grammar. It just mimics the language used in training data. Humans speak differently depending on their background, education, intent, and the situation at hand. AI, on the other hand, is unable to perceive context and adapt appropriately. This may lead to AI using overly complicated language when you ask it to use a formal tone.

How to ensure an AI writer tool can create content that’s grammatically correct?

Write a precise and clear prompt
Set instructions for a specific tone of voice or writing style
Review the final content
Break up tasks to ensure content effectiveness

Disregard for Instructions

If you use AI models for a while, you may notice one of the most common mistakes of AI writing which is not following instructions. It often starts to get ‘tired’ and ignores your instructions. You’re not wrong, it does forget initial instructions if the conversation gets long.

ChatGPT and other AI tools have a memory capacity that has a tendency to run out. So, the further you move away from the initial prompt, the more AI is likely to forget about it and lose logical flow. If you talk to it for long enough, AI will start to adapt to your requests and generate text that it thinks you will like.

So, how do I use AI writing tools for writing essays?

Be as clear as possible in your instructions, i.e., avoid commands like ‘make it better.’
Ensure your prompt is not only clear but also concise.
If you see the tool get repetitive, just restart the conversation.

Wrapping Up

Nobody can judge you for outsourcing some of your homework to AI writing tools. Being aware of the most common errors when using AI for essays will help you avoid them and get the model to produce usable, relevant content.

Writing clear, precise prompts is the first step. Let’s recap the rest of the tips from this article on content creation with AI:

Check every piece of information for accuracy
Speak the tool’s language
Review content to eliminate repetitive phrases and fillers
Be on the lookout for bias
Proofread for grammatical and stylistic errors
Restart the chat if it starts to forget the initial instructions

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Frequently asked questions

Writing a good prompt is the key to success when working with A models. The better you formulate the task for a language model, the more accurate the output will be. Here are some more key rules for writing AI prompts:

Be precise and outline details of the task, such as topic, word count, tone of voice, audience expectations, etc.
Keep it short and don’t overload the prompt with too much detail or AI will lose track
Remind the model about the initial instructions
Break the task into pieces

The precise answer depends on your school’s policy, but generally, submitting AI-generated essays is considered plagiarism and can get a student in big trouble, including legal consequences. You might get lucky, and your professor will not notice the mistakes of AI writing, but it’s best to play it safe.

We recommend only leveraging AI for automating repetitive tasks like outlines or references. However, if you insist on generating content with AI, make sure you thoroughly proofread the paper and run it against a few different AI detectors.

For a professor who is familiar with your writing style, the word choice alone might be enough to understand if you used outside help. At the same time, someone unfamiliar with the way you write could use the following markers to determine whether your paper has been AI-generated: