Do I have to stop using what works just because AI uses it too?

Dear Chatty,

I just got called out for using AI because I wrote a list of three. I tried rewriting it, but two isn’t enough and four is too many. Do I have to stop using what works just because AI uses it too?

~ Craving Threes in Cascade

Dear Craving,

No, absolutely not!

The Rule of Three is older than AI by a few thousand years. Rhetoric. Comedy. Fairy tales. It shows up in architecture, in music, and in the way a sentence finds its rhythm. Interior designers will tell you a grouping of three objects on a shelf feels resolved in a way that two or four simply does not.

You’re craving threes because you’re human. AI absorbed that human preference the same way it absorbed everything else. It writes in threes because humans write in threes and always have. It’s become an AI tell because AI reaches for it every single time, and real writers don’t.

If you’re using AI to write for you, the Rule of Threes being an AI tell is a reason for you to edit AI’s output carefully – not to always remove the lists of three, but to personalize them and the context around them.

If you write your own content and use AI in other ways, don't let armchair detectives talk you out of a sentence that was already yours before they read it.

~ Chatty