Capability-release verbs
- Id
- capability-release-verb
- Status
- Active
- Severity
- low
- Detection
- deterministic
- Evidence grade
- community-observed
- Languages
- en
- Added
- 2026-08-15
- Updated
- 2026-08-17
Currently signals low-effort writing.
What it is
Release and elevation metaphors bolted to ordinary improvements. Unlock the potential, unleash the power, supercharge and empower share one move: they describe a capability as having been trapped, so that the product can be the thing that frees it. The pattern matches the fixed collocations rather than the verbs, because unlocking a door and unlocking a game level are literal and common.
Why it reads as machine-made
The metaphor supplies drama that the underlying change does not. It also lets a sentence describe a benefit without naming a mechanism, which is precisely the position a model is in when it has a product name and no product.
Specimens
Our new templates unlock the full potential of your content team and supercharge your weekly workflow. A good template takes the decisions nobody wants to make and makes them once, so the work that follows is only the work. Teams that adopt them stop staring at empty documents. The output speaks for itself soon enough.
The templates are five post shapes we saw working in our own drafts: a teardown, a number with the method attached, an apology for something we got wrong, a question with our answer underneath it, and a link with the reason we kept the tab open.
The repair says what the templates are. The reader can now disagree with the list, which is the point.
How it is detected
- Pattern
- \bunlock(?:s|ing|ed)?\s+(?:the\s+)?(?:full\s+)?(?:potential|power|value)\b|\bunleash(?:es|ing|ed)?\s+(?:the\s+)?(?:full\s+)?(?:potential|power|creativity)\b|\bsupercharg(?:e|es|ed|ing)\s+your\b|\bempower(?:s|ing|ed)?\s+(?:you|your\s+team|teams|users|customers)\s+to\b
- Flags
- gi
- Scope
- sentence
Who writes this way legitimately
Growth marketing and games copy built this register and product marketers write it deliberately for audiences who expect it, so a hit inside a landing page tells you about the genre before it tells you about the author. Unlock is literal in access control, in games, and in anything with a key. Empower is a term of art in law and in governance, where empowering a body to act names an actual grant of authority. Community and development organisations use it in the sense their funders use it. The pattern requires the fixed collocations so that these survive, and a reviewer looking at a hit should ask what capability was supposedly trapped and by what.
Model attribution
Not attributed to a family. Community lists name the family and no published study isolates it, which is what the community-observed grade means here.
Status history
| Date | Status | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-15 | Active | Current across three independent community lists and present in the Kobak excess-word set. Growth marketing keeps producing it under human authorship, which is why the severity is low. |
Sources
- 01vale-ai-tells, 111 machine-checkable rulescommunityaccessed 2026-08-14
- 02tellsign word and phrase listscommunityaccessed 2026-08-14
- 03slop-lint, social-reply-register moldscommunityaccessed 2026-08-14
- 04Kobak et al., Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications, Science Advances 11(27)peer-reviewedaccessed 2026-08-14
CC BY 4.0 / The AI Tells Index, feedsquad.com/ai-tells