The AI speech clichés the audience recognizes from the first sentence

In the British Parliament, the expression "I rise to speak" appeared 601 times in 2025 speeches up to the date of the report, at the end of August. In the same period of 2023, there had been 227. In the first eight months of 2024, 131. The numbers come from an analysis of the official record of debates, Hansard, published by the website PoliticsHome. The jump fueled suspicion among MPs themselves that some of these speeches come from AI tools. One of them said his team plays a kind of bingo to guess which speeches came from the chatbot.

In this fourth article of the series, we look at these marks with you: words, openings and structures that repeat in AI texts and that the audience, even without being able to explain it, comes to associate with a speech written on autopilot.

"I rise to speak": the expression that gave the British Parliament away

According to PoliticsHome, Labour MP Mike Reader said his team plays "ChatGPT Bingo," a game to identify AI-written speeches in the chamber. Conservative Ben Obese-Jecty was harsher and said that relying on ChatGPT "makes a mockery of the role MPs play."

British radio station LBC reported another figure. A study by Edinburgh Napier University found signs of AI-generated content in 243 of 4,200 parliamentary speeches, about 5%. According to the station, Labour MP Steve Yemm is the only one who has admitted using it, and MP Andrea McGlinchey argued that "more transparency is needed."

Keep the caveat in mind: the repeated phrase signals a trend and does not prove that a specific speech was written by AI. For you, the point that matters comes before any proof. When an expression starts to sound like a machine's mark, the audience begins to distrust whoever uses it, and the second article in the series shows that this suspicion, on its own, already affects the speaker's image.

The AI speech clichés that keep showing up at corporate events

If you read AI-generated texts often, you recognize certain constructions in the very first paragraph. They appear in convention speeches, year-end messages and inauguration remarks so regularly that they end up becoming a signature. On our list, these are the easiest to recognize:

• Openings that place the speech in a vague time, such as "in an increasingly connected world" or "in today's landscape."
• Inflated vocabulary, with words like journey, leverage, crucial, essential and challenging.
• Sentences that deny one idea only to affirm another right after, repeated several times in the same text.
• Lists always in groups of three, even when the subject calls for two items or five.
• Generic thanks "to everyone who made this moment possible," without a single name.
• Grandiloquent closings about the future that could end any company's speech in the country.

The message sent by Vanderbilt University's Peabody College after the Michigan State shooting in 2023 illustrates the tone. One excerpt, quoted by CBS News, said the shootings were "a tragic reminder of the importance of taking care of each other." The sentence is correct and would fit in any statement from any institution. The fifth article in the series tells what happened after students discovered where the text came from.

Why the audience recognizes the cliché even without being able to explain it

The study by Jakesch, Hancock and Naaman, published in PNAS in 2023, showed that people use misleading cues to decide whether a text was written by a person or a machine, such as first-person pronouns and family themes. An event audience, therefore, tends to get it wrong when trying to guess authorship. The cliché, with or without AI in the process, acts on attention. It tires the ear, makes eyes drift to phones and turns the speaker into one more name on the program.

There is a well-known exercise about this. In the 2007 book Made to Stick, brothers Chip and Dan Heath report that, after one-minute speeches in a Stanford class, 63% of students remembered the stories told and only 5% remembered any individual statistic. It is a classroom exercise, without peer review, and the figure reaches us through a blog that cites the book. Even with that limitation, it points in the same direction as the experience of those who write for the stage: the audience retains what is concrete and particular.

The cliché is, by definition, the generic sentence that fits any occasion, any company and any year. An AI tool tends to produce this kind of sentence, because it works with the most probable continuations for each passage. When you accept the first draft, you get the most probable text on the subject, which is also the text the audience has already heard many times.

How to swap the cliché for a concrete detail

In our view, the fix starts with a simple question asked of every sentence: could this be said by another president, at another company, in another year? If the answer is yes, the sentence needs a name, a number from the company itself, a place or an episode that only that audience recognizes.

A convention opening gains strength when it tells a fact from the team's own year, with the month, the result and the name of the person who made the difference, all checked with the department's leadership. That paragraph gives the audience a fact to remember and a name to applaud. It is the kind of passage that makes someone nudge the colleague next to them.

The same goes for your thank-yous. A list of names, with a sentence about what each person did, takes more time and more work from the writer. It also gives the people mentioned a concrete reason to remember the speech. The ninth article in the series returns to this point when discussing the rhythm and breathing of spoken text.

The first-sentence test

The audience's attention is decided early. Openings that start with the global landscape, the changing world or the formal thanks to all the authorities present tell the audience that the rest of the text will follow the same path. That is why we suggest you start with a scene, an unexpected fact or a question only your company could ask. These devices buy you a few minutes of genuine attention.

Try the test with your last speech. Read the first sentence aloud and ask yourself whether it could have been generated by a tool from a one-line request. If the answer bothers you, the problem is probably repeated in the sentences that follow.