# Carousel cover promise 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: carousel-cover-promise - Category: Platform-specific (platform) - Subcategory: carousel - Also known as: swipe for the secret, cover claim the slides repeat - Status: Active. Currently signals low-effort writing. - Severity: low - Evidence grade: feedsquad-observed (our own corpus only, no external attestation) - Languages: en - Added: 2026-08-15 - Updated: 2026-08-15 - Page: https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells/carousel-cover-promise ## Description A carousel whose cover slide promises a payload that the following slides only restate. Slide two renames the promise, slide three renames it again, and the last slide asks for a follow. Nothing between the cover and the end adds a number, a name or a step. ## Why it reads as machine-written The cover is the part that gets designed and the slides are the part that gets filled, and generation fills them from the cover text. Ten slides of restatement is what that produces. A carousel written from material rather than from its own cover leaks a specific by slide two, because material has specifics in it. ## Detection Type: judge (a rubric for a lightweight model judge) Rubric for a lightweight model judge: ```text Read the cover slide and write down exactly what it promises. Then read every following slide looking for one number, one proper noun or one concrete step that does not already appear on the cover. Return no-tell the moment you find one, on any slide. Return tell only when no slide adds anything the cover did not already say, quoting the cover claim next to the slide that was supposed to deliver it. ``` ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > 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 testing your pricing. After, repaired: > Cover: Why we raised our entry price from 29 to 49 euros. Slide 2: trial-to-paid held at 21 percent for the six weeks after the change. Slide 3: the two segments that did churn, both under five seats. Slide 4: the annual plan we added so they had somewhere to land. Note: Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. Educators publish carousels that deliver, and the format itself is a teaching format with a long history on Instagram and LinkedIn. Designers also put the payoff on the last slide on purpose, which looks like withholding until you reach it. The check is mechanical rather than aesthetic: does any slide contain a number, a name or a step that is absent from the cover. If one does, the carousel is doing its job whatever the cover sounded like. ## Model attribution No family attribution. Any assistant asked to expand a headline into ten slides restates rather than researches, because restating is what the instruction asks for. ## Sources 1. FeedSquad carousel drafts, LinkedIn and Instagram (FeedSquad observation) Corpus: Carousel drafts produced by FeedSquad writing agents from a single headline prompt, reviewed before publishing, 2026. Qualitative only, with no slide-level counts kept, which is why the grade is our own corpus rather than anything stronger. Observed 2026-08-15 ## Status history Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page. - 2026-08-15, Active: No external source documents this shape, so it ships on our own corpus and is graded feedsquad-observed. Low severity because the rubric escape hatch is easy to clear and honest educational carousels clear it on slide two. ## 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.