ai-writing-detox

AI Writing Detox

What This Skill Does

Rewrites AI-flavoured copy into a publishable register by stripping the language tells of an LLM draft — buzzwords, throat-clearing, false-inclusive openers, and the "not just X — Y" rhetorical tic — and supplies the canonical banned-list that runtime hooks read to flag drafts before they ship.

When To Use This Skill

• A reporter or producer suspects an LLM drafted (or heavily assisted) the copy and wants a clean rewrite
• A subeditor is reviewing a piece that reads "fluently bland" — grammatically correct, recognisably synthetic
• Before posting any external surface (article, show notes, newsletter, README) where the audience is media professionals who notice these tells
• When onboarding a new contributor whose first drafts default to AI register
• As the source of truth for the ai-slop-detector runtime hook (see Hook Contract below)

What You Need To Provide

Required: The draft text you want detoxed. Optional: Outlet or surface (news article, show notes, internal memo, README), audience register (general public, working journalists, investor-facing), any preserved terms (e.g., a term that looks like jargon but has been defined earlier in the piece), word-count constraint if the rewrite must hit a length.

How the Assistant Approaches This

1. Reads the full draft and identifies every hit against the Hard ban list — these are non-negotiable rewrites.
2. Reads it again for Soft warn patterns — surfaces them with one-line reasons; the editor decides whether to keep, soften, or cut.
3. Produces a rewritten draft that preserves every load-bearing fact and quote, swaps banned vocabulary for the plainest accurate alternative, and dismantles "not just X — Y" / "it's not about X, it's about Y" constructions into direct claims.
4. Returns a short before/after table for the most consequential changes so the writer can learn the pattern, not just take the rewrite.

Output Format

• A clean rewritten draft as the headline deliverable, ready to drop in.
• A Changes table (3–8 rows): original phrase → replacement → which lens motivated the cut (Plain-language default, Cut the meta, Honest hedging, Concrete over abstract, Reader respect).
• A Soft-warn flags list for items that were left in but the editor should review.
• Tone is direct and practical — written for an editor who will sign off the final cut.
• Length scales with the input. The rewrite is at most the length of the original; usually shorter once the buzzwords come out.