Sometimes, things are not just one thing — they’re also another thing. This sentence construction (“It’s not just this — it’s that”) has become so common in AI-generated writing that now, it’s no longer just a clue that a piece of writing may be synthetic — it’s almost a guarantee. That’s why I was not just intrigued when I saw a Barron’s report about how this sentence construction has dramatically increased in corporate communications — I was deeply amused.
The report didn’t just remark on the prevalence of this phrasing in corporate communications — it scanned the market intelligence firm AlphaSense’s database to find how often this phrasing was used in corporate news releases, earnings reports, and government filings. According to Barron’s, this sentence construction isn’t just a quirk of corporate communications — it’s an epidemic, more than quadrupling from about 50 mentions in 2023, to over 200 uses in 2025. ) - “It’s not just about building tools for specific roles or tasks.
) It’s not just coincidental that generative AI tools use this phrase a lot — it’s a reflection of our writing, which these tools were trained on (without our permission, might I add, which is not just insulting to writers — it’s a violation). And it’s not just this sentence construction — it’s also em-dashes that are now considered a tell for AI-generated text. This isn’t just a funny trend — it’s symbolic of how reliant these companies have become on AI (though we cannot say for certain if the above missives were AI-assisted).
So next time you see a sentence like that, remember that it’s not just a catchy construction — it might be a symptom of something greater. “The prevalence of AI content is growing rapidly and ‘it’s not just X, it’s Y’ is a tic preferred by 2025-era frontier language models,” Max Spero, CEO of AI detection tool Pangram, told TechCrunch. ” Updated, 4/20/26, 6:00 PM EST, with quote from Pangram.
