Banned AI-word lists decay fast; developer builds rubric-based editing tool instead

A developer argues that circulating lists of AI-tell words become obsolete almost immediately, because once a word is publicly flagged, writers stop using it while other AI-typical words quietly spread unnoticed. Research on 1.29 million arXiv abstracts supports this, showing flagged words like 'delve' declined before any model update, while unflagged ones like 'significant' kept rising. The deeper problem, the author contends, is that AI-assisted drafts tend to commit to nothing, hiding concrete facts behind vague language rather than stating them plainly. To address this, the developer built an open-source tool called bluepencil that extracts a draft's core claim, protects quoted phrases for voice preservation, applies a 36-item editing rubric, and uses separate critic passes to reduce self-scoring bias. The project also highlights a worsening fabricated-citation problem, with unsupported or hallucinated references in academic papers rising from roughly 1 in 2,828 in 2023 to 1 in 277 in early 2026, according to Topaz et al. in The Lancet.