# Capability-release verbs Part of [The AI Tells Index](https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells). 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. ## Facts - Id: capability-release-verb - Category: Lexical (lexical) - Subcategory: metaphor-verbs - Also known as: unlock, unleash, unlock the potential, unlock the power, empower, supercharge, elevate - Status: Active. Currently signals low-effort writing. - Severity: low - Evidence grade: community-observed (named by practitioners, no formal measurement exists) - Languages: en - Added: 2026-08-15 - Updated: 2026-08-17 - Page: https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells/capability-release-verb ## Description 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-written 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. ## Detection Type: deterministic (a regular expression, run as written) Scope: sentence ECMAScript regular expression. The build validator compiles it and tests it against this entry's own specimens. ```regex \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 ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > 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. After, repaired: > 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. Note: The repair says what the templates are. The reader can now disagree with the list, which is the point. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. 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. ## Sources 1. vale-ai-tells, 111 machine-checkable rules https://github.com/tbhb/vale-ai-tells (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) 2. tellsign word and phrase lists https://github.com/ctkrug/tellsign (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) 3. slop-lint, social-reply-register molds https://github.com/eric-sabe/slop-lint (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) 4. Kobak et al., Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications, Science Advances 11(27) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt3813 (tier: peer-reviewed; accessed 2026-08-14) ## Status history Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page. - 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. ## License CC BY 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Attribution: The AI Tells Index, feedsquad.com/ai-tells Reuse the data, including commercially. Keep the attribution line. --- Dataset version 1.0.0. Schema version 1. Part of [FeedSquad](https://feedsquad.com). Built by [Herman Foundry](https://hermanfoundry.com) from Levi, Finnish Lapland.