The AI Tells Index
A catalogue of the patterns that make writing read as machine-made.
A tell signals low effort. It does not identify an author. Skilled writers produce every shape listed here, some of them daily, and automated detectors misread those writers for it at rates measured above 60 percent on non-native English prose. Nothing in this index proves that a machine wrote anything. Read an entry as one piece of evidence to weigh against the false-positive notes printed beside it.
This index is the research; the live gate is /anti-slop, the shorter list FeedSquad checks every generated post against, and agents can run the dataset itself from /ai-tells/skill.md.
- Active (105)
- Currently signals low-effort writing.
- Fading (6)
- Signal is weakening, usually because model vendors trained the habit out.
- Burned (3)
- So widely publicised that human writers now trip it too, or vendors removed it. Signal value has collapsed. Kept because retired signal is information.
- Contested (23)
- Credible people dispute that this signals anything at all.
Lexical
20Excess-vocabulary cluster (delve, underscore, intricate)
A set of ordinary English style words whose frequency jumped after late 2022.
“This piece delves into the intricate landscape of remote onboarding, underscoring the pivotal part a robust welcome sequence plays in long-term...”
Significance inflation (underscores the importance)
A verb of emphasis bolted to an abstract noun of importance.
“The launch underscores the importance of community feedback in modern product development. Teams that listen to their users early tend to build...”
Formal transition crutch
Formal connectives used as the joint itself.
“Additionally, the onboarding flow was updated. Furthermore, the copy was revised for clarity, and the revision was reviewed internally before...”
Importance-inflation adjectives
An adjective asserts that something matters and the sentence never says what turns on it.
“Onboarding plays a crucial role in whether a new customer stays. Expectations get set early, and expectations are what people remember when renewal...”
Unanchored novelty superlatives
Novelty and impact claimed at maximum strength with nothing to check the claim against.
“Our groundbreaking new platform will revolutionize the way teams plan their content. Planning is the part everybody puts off, and putting it off has...”
Latinate quantity flourish
An ornate quantity noun where a number or the word many would carry the same information.
“The dashboard surfaces a myriad of signals from a wide range of connected sources. Some of them matter more than others, and which ones matter comes...”
Capability-release verbs
Release and elevation metaphors bolted to ordinary improvements.
“Our new templates unlock the full potential of your content team and supercharge your weekly workflow. A good template takes the decisions nobody...”
Domain metaphor nouns
A spatial or biological metaphor noun standing in where the plain name of the subject would go.
“The competitive landscape for scheduling tools shifted again this quarter, and the developer ecosystem is responding in the ways you would expect it...”
Journey and navigation metaphors
Movement metaphors applied to reading, learning and ordinary work.
“This guide helps you navigate the complexities of social scheduling as you embark on your content journey. Everyone arrives at this point with...”
Institutional abstraction verbs
Institutional verbs standing in for the specific verb for what was done.
“The new workspace fosters collaboration and helps teams utilize a variety of tools more effectively. Work gets easier to see when it lives in one...”
Canned conclusion phrases
A phrase that announces an ending instead of being one.
“In conclusion, consistency matters more than volume when you are building an audience. Showing up on a schedule you can keep is worth more than a...”
2026 precision-hedge cluster
The current frontier vocabulary profile, which is nothing like the 2023 one.
“Results were comparatively modest and largely attributable to seasonal variation, which we typically observe in this period. Performance across...”
GPT-4o creative-register cluster
Creative-writing vocabulary that was overrepresented in the GPT-4o era and is decaying as a group.
“There was a palpable camaraderie in the room, a fleeting and unspoken sense that something had shifted. Amidst the noise a whimsical thought surfaced...”
Peer-review praise register
Evaluative praise vocabulary that rose sharply in conference peer review after 2022.
“The authors have done a commendable job, and the meticulously crafted methodology makes for a compelling read. The framing is timely and the argument...”
Quality-assertion adjectives
Adjectives that assert quality in a slot where the sentence could have demonstrated it.
“A robust platform with seamless integration and a comprehensive set of publishing features. Everything is built to work the way you already work, so...”
Depth-claim adjectives
Adjectives that claim analytical depth for analysis that never arrives.
“The report offers a nuanced understanding of a multifaceted problem deeply rooted in team culture. The findings resist easy summary, which is part of...”
A testament to
A formula that converts any fact into evidence of greatness.
“The response from the community is a testament to the power of building in public. People want to see the work and not only the outcome, and showing...”
Figurative verb family
A small set of figurative verbs recycled as the default way to say that something matters.
“The pricing change carries real weight, and the reasoning behind it sits at the heart of how we think about value. A price is a statement about who a...”
Emphatic adverbs
Intensifying adverbs that add emphasis and no content.
“This is truly remarkable work. Simply put: nobody else is doing it, and the care behind it is genuinely rare in a category this crowded.”
Multilingual lexical uptake
The post-2022 lexical shift is not an English problem.
“Tämä artikkeli syventyy etätyön monimutkaiseen kokonaisuuteen ja korostaa selkeän viestinnän merkitystä. Luottamus rakentuu hitaasti ja katoaa...”
Structural and syntactic
21Copula avoidance (serves as, stands as, functions as)
Where a plain sentence would use is or was, the text reaches for a heavier verb plus as plus an article.
“The old mill serves as a reminder of what the town used to be and stands as a focal point for the community. Buildings like it tend to hold a place...”
Participial tack-on padding
A sentence finishes. Then a comma arrives, and an -ing clause says the same thing again in the register of analysis. Reinhart and colleagues counted present participial...
“The council approved the new cycle lane, marking a significant step forward for the city's transport plan. The decision was welcomed by residents...”
Nominalization overload
Verbs freeze into abstract nouns, and then a weak verb has to carry them.
“The implementation of the new review process resulted in an improvement in the identification of defects prior to release. The introduction of...”
That-clause subjects
A sentence opens with a that-clause standing in as its subject, and the main verb then evaluates the proposition.
“That the pilot ran without a single rollback shows that the deployment process was sound. That nobody raised a concern during the review suggests the...”
Paired-phrase coordination
Nouns and adjectives arrive in pairs where one member would carry the whole meaning.
“The platform provides clarity and insight into your data, and gives teams the tools and resources they need for informed and confident decisions. It...”
Uniform sentence cadence
Sentence lengths sit in a narrow band and the prose keeps time.
“The team reviewed the numbers on Monday. The results were better than the previous quarter. The marketing spend stayed flat across every channel. The...”
Sentence-opener repetition
Consecutive sentences starting from the same small set of words, usually a determiner or one of a handful of connectives.
“The report landed on Friday. The numbers were lower than expected. The team met on Monday. The plan is being revised.”
Paragraph over-fragmentation
A body built almost entirely from paragraphs of one or two sentences.
“We shipped the new onboarding last week. It went well. The team learned a lot from the process. Everyone contributed. There is more to do here. We...”
Fractal summaries
Every paragraph closes by summarising itself, every section closes by summarising its paragraphs, and the document closes by summarising the sections.
“The pilot ran in two offices for six weeks. Helsinki logged fewer support tickets and Tampere logged none. Support tickets fell in both offices. The...”
Signposted conclusion
A closing section that announces its own arrival and then hands back the opening claim unchanged.
“The review process needed changing, and everything above explains why it needed changing. The team should take a look at it. Change is worth the...”
Cataphoric forecasting
The text announces how many points are coming before it makes any of them.
“There are three key reasons the migration slipped, and each one deserves its own paragraph. The first comes down to planning, or rather the lack of...”
Structure announcement
The text narrates what it is about to do instead of doing it.
“Let's break this down. First we will look at what changed about the pricing, then at why it changed, and then at what it means for you going forward...”
Restatement intro
The first paragraph says the headline again in longer words, or a takeaways block above the article does it in bullets.
“Headline: why our onboarding email sequence stopped working. Onboarding email sequences can stop working, and understanding why they stop working...”
Empty preamble padding
Throat-clearing paragraphs sitting where the content should start.
“Before we get into the details, some context helps. Communication inside a growing company is something many teams think about. Getting it right...”
One-point dilution
One claim, restated across several paragraphs in different clothes.
“Remote work needs clear written communication. When teams are distributed, writing things down is how information travels. Without written records...”
Listicle in a trench coat
Paragraphs that are list items with connective tissue pasted between them.
“One area worth attention is pricing. Pricing sets expectations before anyone speaks to sales. Another area is onboarding. Onboarding decides whether...”
Elegant variation
One referent, many names, rotated so that no word appears twice.
“The 2024 audit found three gaps. The review also noted a delay in reporting. The assessment recommended a follow-up, and the study is now with the...”
Broken enumeration
A numbered list whose numbering repeats, resets, or contradicts the count the text promised.
“1. Check the chain with a wear gauge. 1. Replace the brake pads. 1. Re-tape the bars.”
Essay scaffolding in a social post
A 120-word post carrying a general opening, a middle of parallel points and a closing that returns to the opening.
“Hiring is one of the harder parts of running a small company. There are a few reasons for this. The market is competitive. A small team cannot absorb...”
Staccato fragment run
Runs of verbless fragments used to set a rhythm.
“We rebuilt the checkout screen and the difference showed up straight away. Faster onboarding. Fewer support tickets. Nobody has asked what either of...”
Contraction avoidance
Not one contraction anywhere in a text that otherwise reads like speech.
“I am glad you asked about the pricing change. It is not something we do often, and we do not expect it to affect most customers. We will publish the...”
Rhetorical and discourse
24The challenges-then-outlook closer
A closing move in two beats. First a paragraph conceding difficulty in general terms. Then a paragraph predicting that the difficulty will be overcome. Neither beat...
“Despite its rapid growth, the sector faces several challenges, including regulatory uncertainty and questions around long-term sustainability...”
"It's not X, it's Y"
A clause denies one description of the subject and immediately substitutes a larger one, with no connective between the halves.
“Onboarding isn't a checklist, it's a relationship. That distinction sounds slight on the page and it changes very nearly everything about how the...”
Rule of three used as padding
Three parallel items in a coordinated series, used as the default shape for every list in a document.
“The new dashboard is faster, cleaner, and smarter. It helps teams plan, execute, and review. The result is better visibility, better decisions, and...”
Rhetorical question that answers itself
A section or paragraph opens with a question aimed at the reader, and the next sentence answers it.
“So what does this mean for your pipeline? It means you need to rethink how you qualify leads, because qualification comes down to judgement in the...”
Not only X but also Y
Two coordinated members joined by a correlative pair.
“Our scheduler is not only a calendar but also a strategist for your entire content operation. Planning ahead is what makes publishing consistent, and...”
Not X. Not Y. Just Z.
Three fragments in a row. The first two deny, the third supplies a minimal answer. tropes.fyi lists the shape by name and slop-lint catalogues the staccato reply...
“Not a tool. Not a platform. Just leverage. That is the whole idea, and it takes a while for anyone to stop asking what the software does and start...”
Anaphora abuse
The same opening words on three or more successive sentences, built as parallel construction.
“We write for the people who read every word. We write for the people who skim and come back later. We write for the people who never reply at all. It...”
False-suspense transition
A line announcing that something surprising follows.
“Here's the kicker: nobody realises this is happening while it is happening. The signals sit there the whole time and nothing gets looked at until...”
Magic adverbs
One adverb carries the entire claim. tropes.fyi names the family after its most common member. The sentence asserts that a large change happened without anyone noticing...
“A handful of small studios are quietly reshaping how software gets sold. The shift has been under way for some time and nobody has quite noticed...”
False range
A fronted from-to phrase that looks like a spectrum and bounds nothing.
“From startups to enterprises, every team needs a content strategy. The specifics differ, obviously, though the discipline underneath does not change...”
Asserted obviousness
The claim is declared self-evident in place of being argued.
“The truth is simple: consistency beats talent every time. Nobody disputes it, almost nobody acts on it, and the gap between those two facts is where...”
Manufactured aphorism molds
Reply-sized wisdom cast from a small set of reusable frames.
“Trust is what keeps a team from becoming a queue. Every company says it values trust, and almost none of them can point to something they did last...”
Mic-drop closer
A final line, set as its own paragraph, engineered to land.
“We rebuilt the publish queue in June and the retry logic in July. The future belongs to the teams who ship.”
Hedging preamble
A softening scaffold placed in front of a plain statement.
“It's worth noting that the deadline may shift depending on a number of external factors. Timelines of this kind are rarely as fixed as they look on a...”
Vague attribution
The authority is asserted and never named.
“Experts argue that the shift will accelerate through the rest of the decade. The pace is harder to call than the direction, and reasonable people...”
False vulnerability
A confession used as a hook. tropes.fyi lists the pattern by name and vale-ai-tells ships neighbouring rules for the register. The opener claims reluctance, a failure...
“I almost did not share this. Three years ago I nearly walked away from all of it. What I learned about resilience changed how I work.”
Manufactured relatability
A claim about the reader, asserted as shared fact.
“We've all been there. The deadline moves, the brief changes, and suddenly it is Friday afternoon, which everyone in this line of work recognises...”
Curiosity-gap withholding
A headline or subject line names a category of information and withholds the item itself.
“The one thing nobody tells you about hiring your first employee”
Think-of-it-as analogy reflex
An explanation reaches for a comparison before it has stated the thing.
“Think of it as a nervous system for your whole content operation. Everything connects to everything else, and that is really the whole promise once...”
Imagine-a-world opener
The hypothetical-scenario opener. tropes.fyi lists it and vale-ai-tells ships an opening-cliches rule with 92 tokens covering it and its neighbours. Burned rather than...
“Imagine a world where your content writes itself. The calendar fills, the drafts appear, and the rest comes down to deciding what is worth keeping...”
Generic scene-setting opener
The zoomed-out first line. It describes an era instead of a subject, and it fits any topic at all. vale-ai-tells covers it inside an opening-cliches rule with 92 tokens....
“In today's fast-paced world, staying visible online has never been more challenging. Audiences have more to choose from and less time to spend on any...”
Moralizing closer
A lesson appended to material that did not produce it.
“The migration took eleven days and cost us two weekends. What this teaches us is that preparation always pays off in the end.”
Superlative stacking
Superlatives and absolute intensifiers piled inside a short passage.
“Absolutely perfect from start to finish. Hands down the best experience we have ever had, and the staff were incredibly amazing throughout.”
The real question pivot
The stated topic is set aside for a claimed deeper one.
“The real question is whether any of this scales. But the harder truth is that scale was never the constraint, and everyone in the room usually knows...”
Formatting
16Bolded lead-in on every list item
Every item in a vertical list opens with a bolded phrase followed by a colon and an explanation.
“**Consistency:** Post regularly so your audience knows when to expect you. **Authenticity:** Share real experiences rather than generic advice...”
Emoji used as document structure
Emoji placed at the front of headings or list items, carrying the document's structure rather than any meaning.
“🚀 Launch week is here! ✅ New dashboard 🔥 Faster exports 💡 Smarter alerts”
Raw markdown in a surface that does not render it
Markdown syntax appears verbatim in a surface that renders none of it.
“Read the full breakdown here: [why retention really matters](https://example.com/post) ## What we learned about churn Retention is one of those...”
Em-dash density
Em dashes arrive at a rate well above what the genre and the surface usually carry.
“The rollout went well—better than we planned—and support tickets dropped. Our onboarding flow—short and honest about limits—did most of the work. The...”
Space-surrounded em dash
Em dashes set with a space on each side, repeatedly, in a surface whose house style closes them up.
“We shipped the new importer late — later than any of us wanted — and nobody complained. Shipping late is something every team learns to live with —...”
Double-hyphen dash
Two ASCII hyphens standing in for a dash in rendered text.
“The migration took two weeks--twice what we budgeted--and the lessons were worth the delay. Every migration teaches a team something about its own...”
Title Case headings
Headings capitalise every main word in a publication whose house style is sentence case.
“Impact Of Technology On Regional Growth Digital tooling has changed how the region thinks about growth, and much of that change took place before...”
Boldface in running prose
Chosen terms bolded through ordinary paragraphs with no list anywhere near them.
“The **billing migration** was the quarter that taught us the most. **Billing** touches everything we do, so the **migration** was never going to be...”
Curly quotes in plain-text registers
A text carries the full typographic set, curly quotation marks together with curly apostrophes, in a register whose composer produces straight ones.
“We asked our customers what “good support” actually means to them, and the answers weren’t surprising so much as familiar. People want to feel heard...”
Decorative horizontal rules
A rule drawn between every section of a piece short enough not to need one.
“What we changed this month ---- We moved the export job to a queue. ---- Support tickets about timeouts stopped. ---- Next month we look at imports.”
Unnecessary tiny tables
A table built for two or three rows of information that was never tabular.
“Our support numbers | Metric | Figure | | Tickets 2025 | about 4,100 | | Median first reply | 3 hours | | Languages covered | four |”
Vendor markup artifacts
A tool's internal citation token published as text.
“Our numbers this quarter are in line with the sector average :contentReference[oaicite:4]{index=4}, which is broadly what we had modelled at this...”
Unfilled placeholders
A template slot published with the slot still in it.
“Thanks again for the call last week. I have attached the deck and the pricing sheet. Best regards, [Your Name]”
TL;DR box reflex
A summary block sitting on top of a piece too short to need one.
“TL;DR: We moved our newsletter to a new provider and it went fine. We moved our newsletter to a new provider last month. It went fine. Deliverability...”
Decorative symbol strings
Arrows, star strings and runs of punctuation carrying structure or emphasis that the sentences never earned.
“Three changes this week ★★★ → faster exports → fewer timeouts → a new billing page Go and look!!!”
Emphatic italics
Italics used for spoken stress across running prose.
“The migration *did* run clean. What surprised us was that it ran clean for the *right* reasons, which is the kind of thing you only see clearly...”
Semantic
24Specificity vacuum
The text asserts things about the world and names nothing in it.
“Consistency is the foundation of any successful content strategy. Brands that post regularly build trust with their audience over time, and trust is...”
No first-person incident
The piece gives advice and reports no occasion on which the author did anything.
“Hiring your first employee is one of the most important decisions a founder will make. Take your time, define the role clearly, and trust your...”
Real entity, fabricated work product
A person, institution or company that a reader can look up, attached to a book, quotation, study or credential that does not exist.
“Dr. Helena Marsh of the Northfield Institute for Consumer Trust found in her 2023 study Signals That Sell that shoppers abandon a checkout within...”
Well-formed citation, no referent
The citation has correct form and no referent.
“A 2019 review in the Journal of Applied Retail Analytics (doi:10.9999/jara.2019.04.007) found that shelf placement outperformed price promotion in 61...”
Citation with invalid temporality
A cited source is dated before the event it is cited for.
“The September 2025 recall was widely covered at the time, including in the industry survey cited below, which sets out the same failure mode in...”
Confident arithmetic error
Calm, grammatical, authoritative prose whose numbers do not survive a calculator.
“Put 10,000 euros into an account paying 3 percent a year and after twelve months you have earned 10,300 euros in interest.”
Domain-blind sentence
A sentence that parses, scans and means nothing workable.
“Sourdough is a good first bread for beginners, because the starter can be mixed the same morning you plan to bake and needs no special handling.”
Register collapse on borrowed phrasing
Source material is carried across with its emotional register inverted.
“Our third stop is the memorial garden, a peaceful green space the city opened after the 2016 fire. Bring a picnic and make an afternoon of it.”
Satire laundered as fact
A joke is retrieved, stripped of the cues that marked it as one, and restated as instruction.
“A common fix for a slow laptop is to freeze the drive overnight, which forum users report restores read speeds for good.”
Pseudo-lexical labels
Strings shaped like technical vocabulary that are not language.
“Figure 2 labels the three stages of the pipeline as Preproccenting Layer, Feature Extructation and Ouput Nomalisation, and the caption calls the...”
Unfalsifiable byline
A byline with a warm, specific biography and no verifiable existence anywhere else.
“Tom Ridgeway grew up repairing outboard motors on his grandparents' lake in northern Michigan and has been writing about boats for over a decade.”
Unverifiable specific geography
Named small towns, venues and local officials that do not exist.
“In Kellenmoor, a former mill town of about 900 in the eastern hills, the parish clerk has run the same October ceremony every year since 1974.”
Undue significance inflation
An arbitrary detail is puffed into a contribution to a larger story.
“The company opened its second office in 2019, setting the stage for a decade of regional growth and reflecting a wider movement toward distributed...”
Canned notability emphasis
The text lists what kinds of sources covered a subject instead of what those sources said.
“Aino Verkkola is a designer whose work has been featured in numerous national media outlets and who maintains an active social media presence across...”
Promotional register in the wrong genre
Advertising register arrives in prose whose genre forbids it.
“Our platform, known for its reliable performance, experienced a brief service interruption on Tuesday. We remain committed to delivering an...”
Internal factual contradiction
Two claims inside one document that cannot both be true, delivered in a register that never notices.
“The lake freezes over in late November, and the ice fishing season opens in October once the lake has frozen and the ice is safe.”
Invented concept labels
A coined, capitalised framework presented as an established term of art.
“This is the Trust Gradient at work: attention falls as specificity rises, an effect every practitioner in the field will recognise the moment it is...”
Confident report, no reproducible artifact
A technical report with every section in the right place, describing something that does not happen.
“Steps to reproduce: send a request with a malformed Host header. The parser dereferences a null pointer and the process exits. Impact: remote denial...”
Low-profile speculation
A gap in the sources is narrated as a fact about the subject.
“Little is known about Rautio's early career, and she appears to maintain a low profile outside her professional work. Her education is similarly...”
Invented internal references
A confident reference to a rule, page, ticket or precedent inside an organisation that does not exist.
“Per section 4.2 of the editorial handbook, we do not publish vendor benchmarks without a second independent source. This has been settled policy for...”
Fabricated precision
A number with a decimal point and no parent.
“Posts published on Tuesday mornings see 31.4 percent more engagement, and the ranking system weights them 2.3 times higher during the first hour.”
Laundered statistic
A real number from real work, republished without the scope that made it true.
“Optimizing for generative engines raises visibility by 40 percent, and more than half the internet is now AI-generated.”
Confident misattribution
A credit that sounds right and travels because nobody opens the primary.
“The term was coined in 2024 by the developer who wrote the definitive post about it. The name stuck because it captured something the industry had...”
Stale fact stated as current
A fact that was true inside some earlier window, given in the present tense with no date on it.
“The free tier includes 500 build minutes a month, and the latest release is version 3. Pricing for tools in this category tends to stay put, so these...”
Platform-specific
21Echo restatement reply
A reply that paraphrases the post it answers and stops.
“Absolutely agree. Consistency really is the foundation of a good content strategy, and posting regularly does build trust with your audience over...”
Broetry cadence
One sentence per line, blank line between, held for a whole post.
“I almost turned down the meeting. My calendar was already full that week. Something told me to take it anyway. That call changed how I think about...”
Terminal question bait
A closing question built for comment volume rather than for an answer.
“Most teams treat onboarding as a checklist and then wonder why activation is flat. Fix the first week and everything downstream gets easier. Thoughts?”
Explicit engagement request
A direct ask for a reaction, a tag, a share or a save.
“Rough quarter, real lessons. We shipped slower than planned and learned more than expected. Save this post for later and tag a founder who needs it.”
Generic affirmation comment
Abstract praise that would sit equally well under any post, produced at volume.
“Great insights! So true. Thanks for sharing this one.”
Humblebrag parable post
A first-person workplace scene, a reversal where an assumption is overturned, and a lesson bolted on at the end.
“A junior colleague asked me a question I could not answer. I felt the room go quiet. I told her I did not know and would find out. By Friday she had...”
Authenticity vocabulary tic
The pairing of authenticity with vulnerability, in post after post, by an account that demonstrates neither.
“Leadership in 2026 comes down to authenticity and vulnerability. The teams that win are the ones showing up authentically every day, and the leaders...”
Unenhanced repost
Someone else's material, republished with nothing meaningful added.
“Reposting this because it deserves more eyes. Such a great breakdown of retention. Everyone building product should read it.”
Template review with a swapped noun
The same review text appearing across unrelated products with the product noun exchanged.
“This blender does exactly what I needed and the build quality is solid. It arrived quickly and was easy to set up. I would recommend this blender to...”
Volume signature
A step change in publishing rate against a stable baseline.
“Our newsroom publishes 40 in-depth analyses every week, covering markets and policy with rigour you can trust. Our team of expert writers works...”
Generic outlet identity
An outlet name assembled from two ordinary nouns and a news word, attached to a site with no masthead, no named editor and no address.
“Business Post Daily is a leading source of business and technology news, delivering timely coverage to readers worldwide. Written by Staff. Our...”
Description-content mismatch
A title, thumbnail or description that promises something the item does not contain.
“The one setting that doubled our conversion rate. In this video we cover conversion, funnels and why most teams get this wrong from day one.”
Manufactured rage-bait take
A claim published because it will be corrected, where the corrections are the product.
“Nobody in marketing has ever needed a spreadsheet. Every metric that matters fits in your head. If you disagree, you are the problem.”
Hashtag wall
A block of eight or more tags at the end of a caption, sometimes pushed below the fold with padded dots so it does not have to be looked at.
“New guide is live. #marketing #b2b #saas #content #growth #founders #startups #linkedin #strategy #branding”
Numbered thread formula
Numbered sequential posts, the 1/ 2/ 3/ format.
“1/ We rebuilt onboarding last quarter and it did not go the way we planned. 2/ First mistake was assuming the drop-off was inside the product. 3/ It...”
Thread-opener boilerplate
The stock openers of the 2019 to 2022 thread era: the bare thread announcement, the instruction to bookmark, the promise of everything learned.
“Here's everything I learned about pricing in five years. Bookmark this.”
Carousel cover promise
A carousel whose cover slide promises a payload that the following slides only restate.
“Cover: The 5 pricing mistakes killing your SaaS. Slide 2: Mistake 1, pricing too low. Slide 3: Mistake 2, pricing too high. Slide 4: Mistake 3, never...”
Timestamp wall
Show notes that are a column of times against generic topic nouns, with no speaker attributed to any segment and no sign that anyone chose what to list.
“00:00 Introduction. 04:12 Background. 11:30 Discussion. 22:45 Key takeaways. 31:02 Conclusion.”
Episode dive opener
The universal podcast description opener, in which the show announces that it is about to be about its topic.
“In this episode, we dive into customer retention and what really drives loyalty for modern businesses. We talk about why customers leave, what makes...”
Identical cross-post
One text published verbatim on platforms whose formats and audiences do not match.
“Thrilled to announce that our analytics dashboard is now live for all customers. Click the link below to read the full announcement and see what it...”
Template-and-scale sameness
Output that is interchangeable across one author's or one channel's entire body of work.
“Video 3 opening: Have you ever wondered why the ocean is blue? Today we explore five surprising facts about the ocean. Video 4 opening: Have you ever...”
Model register
11Sycophantic opener
The first sentence praises the reader or the question before any content arrives.
“Great question! You're absolutely right that timing matters more than most people think. Consistency is what separates a feed that builds an audience...”
Refusal-text leakage
The published text contains the model refusing the prompt.
“Product title: Sorry, I cannot fulfill this request. Ergonomic Office Chair, Mesh Back, Adjustable Lumbar Support.”
Collaborative address to the reader
The delivery sentence stayed in. The text opens by handing itself over: here is your article, below is the draft you asked for. On a published page there is no you who...
“Here is your article on quarterly planning, written in the professional tone you wanted. Quarterly planning works best when everyone involved...”
Assistant closing offer
The last line offers to keep working. It asks whether the reader wants a section expanded, or whether anything else needs covering. The offer is addressed to whoever ran...
“That is the whole weekly review process, and it works well for most teams. Would you like me to expand any section into its own post?”
Knowledge-cutoff disclaimer
The text dates itself to a training window.
“As of my last training update, the company ran a handful of offices and employed a few dozen people. It has grown steadily since then, in line with...”
Model self-insertion
A sentence in the artifact describes the writer as a language model.
“As an AI language model, I do not hold opinions on vendor choice, though the pricing page could be clearer. Both options have their strengths, and...”
Both-sides affirmation
A response to a conflict validates every party in it and never says who was wrong.
“Your frustration is completely valid, and your colleague's reaction is understandable too given the pressure the team is under. Both perspectives...”
Measured model idiolect
Model families are separable from their output at corpus scale.
“Overall, there are several factors to consider when choosing a project tracker. First, consider your team size. Second, consider your reporting...”
Assistant commit register
Commit messages and edit summaries written in assistant register.
“fix(auth): tighten the session check. All existing behaviour is preserved and the change adheres to the project conventions. All tests passing.”
Translationese formal register
Non-English output arrives in the highest formal register available, whatever the context asks for.
“Anda dapat melakukan pengecekan terhadap status pesanan Anda melalui halaman berikut. Kami senantiasa berupaya memberikan pelayanan terbaik bagi...”
Redundant precaution
A disclaimer attached to material that carries no risk.
“Numbering the workshop bins by shelf works well for most setups. As always, consult a professional before applying this to your own setup.”
Dataset licensed CC BY 4.0. Reuse freely with attribution to feedsquad.com/ai-tells.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/