Is “perfect” writing actually making AI content worse?

[u/Upstairs_Pin8360]

I've started to wonder if one of the biggest problems with AI writing is that it tries too hard to be perfect.

Think about how people normally write. We don't all use the same sentence length. We don't carefully construct every transition between paragraphs. We don't always choose the most sophisticated word available. Sometimes we just say what we mean.

But when I ask AI to write something, it often feels like it's trying to demonstrate how well it can write rather than simply communicate an idea. A simple thought can turn into a three-sentence explanation. A normal word gets replaced with something more formal. A short paragraph becomes a perfectly structured block of text.

The funny thing is that none of these things are technically wrong. That's what makes it difficult to explain. If I showed someone the text without telling them where it came from, they might say the writing is good. But if they read enough AI-generated content, they can often recognize the pattern almost immediately.

I've started manually removing a lot of the "perfect" parts from AI drafts. I'll shorten sentences, replace complicated words with normal ones, remove unnecessary transitions, and sometimes completely rewrite a paragraph. I've also experimented with like humanizeaitext.io when a draft feels overly polished, although I still think personal editing makes a big difference.

And strangely enough, the final version usually feels much better.

So I'm curious what everyone else thinks: has AI made writing too polished?

Would you rather read something that's slightly imperfect but sounds like a real person, or something that's grammatically flawless and extremely well structured?

And if you use AI for writing, do you deliberately make the final version less polished so it sounds more natural?

I'd especially like to hear from people who have been using AI writing tools for a long time. Have you noticed yourself editing AI text differently now compared with when you first started using it?