The Hidden Cost of AI Artifacts in Professional Communication

AI artifacts are the telltale signs that text was generated by an AI system. They include:

• Boilerplate phrases: "Sure, here's..." / "I hope this helps!"
• Typography quirks: Em-dashes (—), curly quotes (""), ellipsis characters (…)
• Structural patterns: Perfectly uniform paragraphs, predictable bullet points
• Tone markers: Overly enthusiastic, hedging language, excessive politeness

These aren't bugs—they're features of how large language models work. But in professional communication, they're liabilities.

1. Trust Erosion

When a client spots AI artifacts in your email, a subtle shift happens. They start wondering: "Did they actually think about my problem, or just prompt ChatGPT?"

Even if your advice is sound, the perception of effort matters. A 2024 study found that 67% of professionals view AI-assisted communication less favorably than clearly human-written content—even when the content quality was identical.

2. The Uncanny Valley of Email

There's a sweet spot in professional communication: polished enough to be professional, human enough to be genuine. Raw ChatGPT output often lands in an uncomfortable middle ground—too perfect to be casual, too formulaic to be thoughtful.

3. Copy-Paste Compatibility Issues

Those fancy em-dashes and curly quotes? They don't always play nice with:

• Email clients: Outlook, Gmail can render them as garbled characters
• CRMs: Salesforce, HubSpot may store them incorrectly
• Legacy systems: Older databases might strip or corrupt them
• Mobile devices: Display inconsistencies across platforms

4. Searchability Problems

Smart quotes and special characters can break text search. Searching for "meeting" won't find "meeting" (different quote characters). Your perfectly crafted content becomes harder to find, reference, and archive.

5. The Accumulating Time Tax

Here's the irony: the time you save generating content, you lose to:

• Manually fixing formatting issues
• Explaining to confused recipients why characters look weird
• Rewriting sections that "sound too AI-generated"
• Dealing with broken links and malformed text

The net time savings? Often negative.

The answer isn't abandoning AI—it's adopting a clean-before-send workflow:

1. Generate with ChatGPT (or any LLM)
2. Clean with a tool like DeGPT that removes artifacts
3. Review and personalize
4. Send with confidence

DeGPT automatically:

• Strips AI boilerplate (intros and outros)
• Converts special characters to ASCII equivalents
• Normalizes formatting for your destination (email, docs, code)
• Preserves your actual content

Professionals who master this workflow get the best of both worlds:

• AI efficiency: Fast first drafts, brainstorming support, structure
• Human authenticity: Content that sounds like them, not like a bot