I measured 100 of my own comments to find out why people kept calling them AI. It was not the writing style.

Someone replied to a comment of mine with "is this GPT-3, use better AI for comment slop". Third time I had been accused of that, so instead of guessing again I went and counted. I pulled a hundred of my published comments, checked which ones got a human reply, and compared the two groups. Twenty four of the hundred got a reply. **What did not matter** Length. The comments that got replies were longer, median 1295 characters against 927 for the silent ones. I had assumed I was writing too much. Wrong. Contractions, question marks, word choice. I had been stripping out the usual tells for weeks. No measurable difference either way. Whether I named my site. Comments with a domain got replies 23 percent of the time, comments without got 24 percent. Basically identical. **What did matter** Numbers. Comments with no figures in them got replies 33 percent of the time. Comments with one or two figures dropped to 12 percent. That was the first real signal and it surprised me, because I had been adding stats thinking they proved I knew what I was talking about. The bigger one: whose situation the comment was about. If the first sentence engaged with something the other person had actually said, 38 percent got replies. If it opened on my own experience or my own data, 20 percent. The openers that worked looked like "good catch on that word, it would pull the wrong searches" or "you are right and I was wrong about that" or "the point above is where this usually breaks". The ones that died looked like "one thing I measured" or "the part that took us longest" or "for me this ended up being". **What I think is actually going on** AI slop is not a style. It is a comment that is relevant to the topic but not to the person. Something you could paste under any post on that subject without editing. That is what people are detecting, and a human can produce it easily, which is why cleaning up your word choice does not help. The stats thing is downstream of the same problem. Numbers are almost always your data, and your data is about you. The test I use now: can I paste this under a different post without changing anything? If yes, it gets rewritten. Happy to be told the sample is too small, twenty four replies is not a lot. But it changed how I write and it was cheap to measure, so it seemed worth sharing.