Changelog

Every dated event in the dataset, newest first. The log is derived from the entries themselves, so it cannot drift from what it describes. The same events publish as an Atom feed at /ai-tells/feed.xml, and the whole dataset is available as JSON at /api/tells.

dataset 1.0.0137 eventsfeed.xml /api/tells

Date	Entry	Event	Status	Rationale
2026-08-15	Not only X but also Y Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active. Wikipedia lists the negative-parallelism family as a current sign, and Silvennoinen gives the construction a precise grammar and separates it from the replacive form. The human base rate is high, which is why severity stays moderate and the entry says the signal lives in repetition.
2026-08-15	Think-of-it-as analogy reflex Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active at low severity. Two practitioner lists name the pattern and neither publishes a rate. The rule is a single narrow phrase family, which keeps the cost of a false hit close to zero.
2026-08-15	Anaphora abuse Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Contested	Opened as contested. tropes.fyi and vale-ai-tells both name stacked anaphora, but Burton records an unbroken teaching tradition and Heritage and Greatbatch measured the parallel shape winning applause in human political speech in 1986. Nobody has published a rate for either population, so the entry ships as a review trigger with the counter-evidence stated.
2026-08-15	Manufactured aphorism molds Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active at high severity. slop-lint screened each mold against roughly 60,000 words of human baseline and required two independent sightings before shipping it, which is a stronger method than any other list in this category offers. It is still a single repository, so the grade stays community-observed.
2026-08-15	Asserted obviousness Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active with low severity. Three practitioner lists carry the family, and none publishes a rate. The move itself is ancient, so the rule is restricted to four fixed phrases and the entry says why.
2026-08-15	Assistant closing offer Model register	Added	Active	Active on two community sources that were compiled separately: the Wikipedia guide to signs of AI-generated comments lists the strings, and vale-ai-tells ships them as a machine-checkable rule. Pattern verified on 2026-08-15 against both specimens and against three ordinary sentences, including a support reply that ends by inviting a question about an invoice.
2026-08-15	Assistant commit register Model register	Added	Active	Active but graded community-observed, because vale-ai-tells is the only taxonomy that covers commit messages as a surface and no measurement of the register exists. Wikipedia edit summaries carry the same shapes, which is corroboration of the pattern, not of a rate. Pattern verified on 2026-08-15 against both specimens and against three ordinary commit sentences, including one that documents a legacy column left in place on purpose.
2026-08-15	Authenticity vocabulary tic Platform-specific	Added	Active	The observation is reader-side folk knowledge with two first-party LinkedIn documents attached, which is why it ships active at low severity. It is a vocabulary tic and vocabulary tics decay fastest, so expect this one to weaken.
2026-08-15	Boldface in running prose Formatting	Added	Active	Active. The vendor evidence is first-party and dated: Anthropic publishes system prompts that instruct against over-formatting, which documents the tendency without measuring output. Wikipedia records the same habit in article space and names the training genres it comes from. The threshold is ours and says so, because no human baseline for bold density has been published.
2026-08-15	Both-sides affirmation Model register	Added	Active	Active on two peer-reviewed and preprint measurements that agree: ELEPHANT reports both-sides affirmation in 48 percent of cases across eleven models and face preservation 45 percentage points above the human rate, and the ICLR 2024 sycophancy work shows preference data rewarding agreement with the user. Judged by rubric and not by string match, because the pattern is a stance across a whole response and no string carries it.
2026-08-15	Broetry cadence Platform-specific	Added	Contested	The format is a documented human invention from 2017, taught in paid courses five years before an assistant could imitate it, and no LinkedIn policy has ever addressed line breaks. Contested is the honest shipping status: the shape is real and worth naming, its signal value is close to zero.
2026-08-15	Broken enumeration Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Documented in the November 2023 reporting on fabricated bylines, where a numbered list labelled every item number one, and still turning up in published material. Nothing in the record shows it fading, because it is a review failure rather than a writing habit.
2026-08-15	Canned conclusion phrases Lexical	Added	Contested	Contested. Named by four independent lists, and simultaneously the standard closing move taught in school essay instruction and required by the structure of an abstract, an executive summary or a legal brief. The signal is about the genre it appears in more than about the sentence.
2026-08-15	Canned notability emphasis Semantic	Added	Active	Wikipedia names the pattern, quotes examples from 2025 revisions and records that it is more common in later models. Single-source, so the grade stays community-observed, and the pattern is written narrowly because the phrasing overlaps with ordinary publicity writing.
2026-08-15	Capability-release verbs Lexical	Added	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.
2026-08-15	Carousel cover promise Platform-specific	Added	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.
2026-08-15	Cataphoric forecasting Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Implemented as a live rule in one community rule set and listed in another, with no report of the habit fading. Severity is low because the move is ordinary in speech and in anything transcribed from it.
2026-08-15	Collaborative address to the reader Model register	Added	Active	Active on Wikipedia primary text: criterion G15 names collaborative address as a sign of communication intended for the user, and the signs-of-AI-writing guide catalogues the same strings at prose level. Pattern verified on 2026-08-15 against both specimens and against three ordinary sentences, including a workbook line that hands the reader a template, which the noun list excludes.
2026-08-15	Confident arithmetic error Semantic	Added	Active	Documented in a news outlet's own correction record and covered by two independent outlets, one of which reported the correction count. The failure recurs wherever numeric copy is published without a numerate reader in the loop.
2026-08-15	Confident misattribution Semantic	Added	Active	One reachable primary that contradicts a widely repeated claim about its own author. Single source, so the grade is community-observed, and the worked example is chosen because a reader can check it in a minute.
2026-08-15	Contraction avoidance Structural and syntactic	Added	Contested	Ships contested. Wikipedia lists formal prose in itself among its ineffective indicators, and readers treat contractions as a warmth marker, which makes the rate a fact about styling rather than about effort.
2026-08-15	Curiosity-gap withholding Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Contested	Opened as contested. The peer-reviewed anchor documents curiosity-gap headlines spreading through human digital publishing in the early 2010s, so the shape carries no authorship signal at all. It ships because a headline whose payload never appears is worth a review pass, and the entry says plainly that the origin is human.
2026-08-15	Curly quotes in plain-text registers Formatting	Added	Contested	Contested from the start. Wikipedia lists the habit and immediately lists the confounds, naming Microsoft Word, the macOS and iOS defaults, Chicago style and citation tools, and stating that two widely used model families typically do not produce curly marks at all. The pattern was narrowed to require a curly quotation mark and a curly apostrophe together, so a lone autocorrected apostrophe does not register. Regex verified on 2026-08-15 against its own specimen and three negatives.
2026-08-15	Decorative horizontal rules Formatting	Added	Active	Active and cheap to check. Wikipedia documents the habit with dated article examples in which a break sits under every section. The pattern requires two rules within 800 characters, so a single genuine scene break never registers. Regex verified on 2026-08-15 against its own specimen and three negatives, one of them a text carrying exactly one break.
2026-08-15	Decorative symbol strings Formatting	Added	Active	Active with low severity, because the human base rate on social surfaces is enormous. Microsoft names the same decorations in guidance written for human copywriters, which is a vendor recording the pattern without measuring it. The character class is narrow: arrow glyphs, runs of two or more stars, and three or more stacked exclamation or question marks. Regex verified on 2026-08-15 against its own specimen and three negatives.
2026-08-15	Depth-claim adjectives Lexical	Added	Active	Active. Present in the Kobak excess-word set and current across three community taxonomies, with nothing reporting decline. Severity is low because the adjectives are common in honest writing and the pattern only catches the fixed phrases.
2026-08-15	Description-content mismatch Platform-specific	Added	Active	YouTube names misleading descriptions in written policy and enforces them under spam, which makes this a documented platform rule rather than a taste judgment. Medium severity because the honest and the dishonest versions sit close together and the policy itself sets a high bar.
2026-08-15	Domain-blind sentence Semantic	Added	Active	The 2023 fake-byline investigation and its trade-press follow-up both identify the impossible instruction as the sentence that broke the story. The pattern survives model improvement because it comes from having no practice rather than from weak language.
2026-08-15	Domain metaphor nouns Lexical	Added	Contested	Contested from the start. Wikipedia lists the family, vale-ai-tells ships rules for it and the LexA per-language data carries the vocabulary, but ecosystem is a defined technical term in two separate fields and the phrase has a documented pre-2022 business register. Listed because the metaphor is worth noticing, graded so that nobody treats a single hit as meaning anything.
2026-08-15	Double-hyphen dash Formatting	Added	Active	Active and cheap. Two independent taxonomies list the form, and the pattern is anchored to a letter on both sides so that command-line flags, which begin with a space and two hyphens, never register. Regex verified on 2026-08-15 against its own specimen and against three negatives including a flag and a chained flag argument.
2026-08-15	Elegant variation Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Carried by the largest maintained public taxonomy under its own shortcut, by a pattern directory and by a teaching-press account, with a stated decoding mechanism behind it. No published work reports it fading.
2026-08-15	Em-dash density Formatting	Added	Contested	Opened as contested. The population shift is measured and holds up: Czuma reports em dash presence in medRxiv Discussion sections rising from 4.23 to 11.58 percent with an odds ratio of 2.96, and its author says the measure does not work per paper. Against that, the published human range of 0.33 to 17.12 per 1,000 words contains every model mean measured so far, two of twelve models emit none at all, and OpenAI shipped suppression in GPT-5.1 in November 2025. A per-document verdict is not available from any of it.
2026-08-15	Emphatic adverbs Lexical	Added	Active	Active, and unusually well evidenced for a word-level entry. Anthropic dated the suppression instruction across three model releases between May and July 2026, which places the tendency in current systems by the vendor own account. The pattern is nonetheless narrow, because the words themselves are ordinary English.
2026-08-15	Emphatic italics Formatting	Added	Active	Active and deliberately weak. The peer-reviewed support is a classifier study showing that model families differ in formatting habits, which is aggregate evidence from a dated snapshot rather than a per-document test. A second candidate entry naming one family by its italics was merged in here, because both rested on that one finding. The threshold is ours and says so.
2026-08-15	Empty preamble padding Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Named as a quality problem in current first-party search rater guidance and carried by two independent community taxonomies. Nothing in the record suggests the habit is weakening.
2026-08-15	Episode dive opener Platform-specific	Added	Active	Still common and still uninformative on its own, so it ships active at the lowest severity. The source base is our own corpus, since the external material on podcast descriptions is entirely tool marketing.
2026-08-15	Essay scaffolding in a social post Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Recorded in FeedSquad agent drafts during the index build on 14 and 15 August 2026. No external taxonomy carries the pattern, so the entry ships at the lowest evidence grade with its corpus named, and severity is low because the shape is competence in the register it came from.
2026-08-15	Explicit engagement request Platform-specific	Added	Active	Three platforms define this in first-party policy text and state the consequence, which is demotion or lost promotion rather than removal. Meta has run the policy since December 2017. Nothing in the evidence suggests the behaviour has stopped, so the entry ships active at high severity.
2026-08-15	Fabricated precision Semantic	Added	Active	Our own corpus only. During the research pass for this index, widely repeated platform-performance figures were traced back and every one of them ended at a vendor or marketing post rather than at a first-party document. No external taxonomy names the pattern, which is why the grade is feedsquad-observed.
2026-08-15	False range Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active. tropes.fyi names the pattern and the anti-slop-writing list carries it as a structural rule. That second list is an evasion prompt and is marked as one, so tropes.fyi is the independent support and the grade stays community-observed.
2026-08-15	False-suspense transition Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active. Named by tropes.fyi and implemented as a rule family in vale-ai-tells. Neither source publishes a rate, which is what the community-observed grade records, and no source reports the shape declining.
2026-08-15	False vulnerability Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active. tropes.fyi names the pattern and vale-ai-tells covers the surrounding register. Neither publishes a rate. Our own drafts show the opener recurring from a single prompt template, which is recorded as an observation about our generations and not as a measurement of anyone else.
2026-08-15	Figurative verb family Lexical	Added	Active	Active, on thin evidence. Two independent rule sets carry the family and no published study measures it, so the entry ships at low severity with the grade stated. It is listed because the substitution test is easy to run and useful, not because anyone has counted it.
2026-08-15	Formal transition crutch Lexical	Added	Active	Wikipedia keeps the formal connectives in its current list, vale-ai-tells ships machine-checkable rules for them, and additionally is one of the three items named by 11 of the 13 independent lists we normalised. Geng and Trotta show publicised markers decaying faster than unpublicised ones, so this entry should be expected to move.
2026-08-15	Fractal summaries Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Named in two independent community rule sets and unmeasured anywhere. Nothing in the vendor record suggests it has been trained out, and the sentence-level markers that accompany it are still shipped as checkable rules.
2026-08-15	Generic affirmation comment Platform-specific	Added	Active	LinkedIn defines automated comments in a first-party newsroom post and describes the enforcement it applies, and the public X algorithm repo carries slop labels enforced through the reply-spam path. Both target volume rather than wording, which is how this entry is scored.
2026-08-15	Generic outlet identity Platform-specific	Added	Active	One organisation publishes the framework and the site counts, so the grade stays community-observed even though the criteria are written down. Severity is high because the entry is about provenance rather than taste, and a reader acting on an unattributable outlet carries real risk.
2026-08-15	GPT-4o creative-register cluster Lexical	Added	Fading	Fading. The family is tied to the GPT-4o generation that Reinhart measured, and the frontier science split we extracted in August 2026 shows a different profile entirely. The vocabulary also sits on published avoid lists, which is the condition under which a marker stops separating anyone from anyone.
2026-08-15	Hashtag wall Platform-specific	Added	Fading	Instagram-era tag stuffing was taught as marketing orthodoxy for a decade and plenty of accounts still run the playbook by hand, so the shape says little about how a caption was produced. It ships fading rather than active: still visible, no longer informative, and de-armed by that status so it does not fire in the lint.
2026-08-15	Hedging preamble Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Contested	Opened as contested. Four independent lists carry the family, including Wikipedia and a professional editing service, but the same formulas appear in the Academic Formulas List as taught academic register. Hedging is a documented obligation in academic, medical and legal writing, so the entry ships with the contest on the record.
2026-08-15	Humblebrag parable post Platform-specific	Added	Active	No external source documents this shape, so it ships on our own corpus and is graded accordingly. It is low severity because the human origin is strong: the broetry tradition invented the anecdote-reversal-lesson post and still teaches it.
2026-08-15	Identical cross-post Platform-specific	Added	Active	This is a genuine observation from FeedSquad's own multi-platform publishing, where the same draft can be pushed to four surfaces in one action, and it is graded on that corpus rather than dressed up with an external citation. Medium severity because the failure is visible to readers and cheap to fix.
2026-08-15	Imagine-a-world opener Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Burned	Opened as burned. The opener is quoted in every popular guide to spotting machine prose and in the jokes about them, so human writers now trip it knowingly while the earnest use has thinned out. Geng and Trotta measured exactly this decay for a publicised lexical marker. The rule stays in the dataset and stops firing, because retired signal is still information.
2026-08-15	Importance-inflation adjectives Lexical	Added	Active	The family is current on the Wikipedia list, carries rules in vale-ai-tells and slop-lint, and sits in the Kobak excess-word set. No source reports it declining.
2026-08-15	Institutional abstraction verbs Lexical	Added	Active	Active. The verbs are in the Kobak excess-word set and carry current rules in vale-ai-tells, and nothing in the evidence base reports them declining. Severity is medium because the abstraction hides content rather than merely decorating it.
2026-08-15	Internal factual contradiction Semantic	Added	Active	Ships active on the mechanism rather than on a measurement. The March 2026 coalition letter to a platform is cited for the register and the population it describes, and it does not attest a contradiction inside a single document, so the evidence grade is our own corpus. Figures circulating alongside that story could not be traced to a primary source and are not used here.
2026-08-15	Citation with invalid temporality Semantic	Added	Active	One community source names it, and the check itself is arithmetic rather than interpretive, so the entry ships on a single citation with that stated. Nothing else in this dataset can be verified as cheaply.
2026-08-15	Invented concept labels Semantic	Added	Active	Named by one community pattern directory and nowhere else in our source set, so the grade is community-observed and the entry says so. The acknowledgement test is what keeps it from condemning ordinary coinage.
2026-08-15	Invented internal references Semantic	Added	Active	Wikipedia documents invented policy citations on its page about machine-written comments, with its own shortcut and quoted examples. Single-source, so the grade is community-observed, and the entry is scoped to internal rule sets to keep it distinct from the citation entries.
2026-08-15	Confident report, no reproducible artifact Semantic	Added	Active	A widely reported programme closure in January 2026, covered by two independent outlets, with the maintainer describing a flood of machine-written reports. Rates circulating with that story could not be confirmed in the cited coverage and are not used here.
2026-08-15	Journey and navigation metaphors Lexical	Added	Fading	Marked fading because the family appears on every published avoid list, including the two gists in the sources, and Geng and Trotta measured publicised markers losing frequency soon after they became famous. A word that everyone has been told to remove tells you about the editing, not the drafting.
2026-08-15	Knowledge-cutoff disclaimer Model register	Added	Active	Active on Wikipedia criterion G15, which names cutoff disclaimers among the examples of communication intended for the user, and on the tellsign phrase list, which carries the same wordings independently. Pattern verified on 2026-08-15 against both specimens and against three ordinary sentences, including one about training records that end in 2019.
2026-08-15	Latinate quantity flourish Lexical	Added	Active	Named by three independent community lists including one whose own purpose is inverted, which is recorded on the source. No published measurement exists for this family, so the grade stays community-observed and the severity stays low.
2026-08-15	Laundered statistic Semantic	Added	Active	Two worked examples with reachable primaries: a benchmark result circulating as a general effect, and a measurement of new articles circulating as a measurement of the web. Both originals state their scope plainly, which is what makes the drift visible.
2026-08-15	Listicle in a trench coat Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Named in one taxonomy and unmeasured anywhere. Ships active because the shape is common in currently published material, and low severity because plenty of good writing is legitimately list-shaped.
2026-08-15	Low-profile speculation Semantic	Added	Active	Wikipedia names the phrasing and quotes dated article revisions using it where no source existed. One source, so the grade is community-observed. The check is cheap, which is why the entry is deterministic rather than a rubric.
2026-08-15	Magic adverbs Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active. tropes.fyi names the adverb family directly and vale-ai-tells ships figurative and inevitability rules that catch neighbouring forms. Neither publishes a rate, so the grade stays community-observed and severity stays low.
2026-08-15	Manufactured rage-bait take Platform-specific	Added	Contested	X's policy reaches the coordinated case and says nothing about a lone provocative post, and intent is not observable from one text. Contested is the only honest status for a tell whose definition depends on a motive nobody can see.
2026-08-15	Manufactured relatability Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active at low severity. Two practitioner lists carry the family and neither publishes a rate. The phrases are also ordinary spoken English, which is why the rule is restricted to four fixed openers.
2026-08-15	Measured model idiolect Model register	Added	Contested	Shipped as contested on 2026-08-15. The underlying measurement is peer-reviewed and strong at corpus level. What is disputed is the inference people draw from it, that one document can be traced to a named product, and that inference has no support in the paper it cites. The entry exists to state the boundary. Snapshot-dated to the ICML 2025 collection, and the two vendor documents cited show the chat surface changing release by release.
2026-08-15	Mic-drop closer Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active. Three practitioner sources carry the family, one of them as a rule with a 63-token vocabulary list. None publishes a rate, and the closing device itself is ancient, so the grade is community-observed and the rubric requires four conditions rather than one.
2026-08-15	Model self-insertion Model register	Added	Active	Active on Wikipedia criterion G15, which names self-insertion among the three signs, and on the vale-ai-tells self-reference rule, which was written independently against the same strings. Pattern verified on 2026-08-15 against both specimens and against three ordinary sentences, including one about a team that trained a large language model on ten years of tickets.
2026-08-15	Moralizing closer Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active at low severity. Two practitioner lists carry the family and neither publishes a rate. The moralising closer is also an old and legitimate genre convention, which the rubric excludes by name rather than by taste.
2026-08-15	Multilingual lexical uptake Lexical	Added	Active	Active. Juzek measures uptake in 26 of 34 languages and the companion dataset covers them; Liang and colleagues find the same shift in consumer complaints, corporate communications and United Nations press releases at population scale. The source is a preprint committed to EMNLP 2026 and is labelled as such on the entry.
2026-08-15	Nominalization overload Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	The only published measurement of the pattern is Reinhart, which found it at roughly twice the human rate in 2024-era models. Nothing since reports the gap closing, and no vendor documentation names the construction as suppressed.
2026-08-15	Unanchored novelty superlatives Lexical	Added	Active	Named by four independent lists in the harvest and by Microsoft in first-party marketing guidance. Nothing reports it fading, and the low severity reflects how much ordinary promotional copy shares the register.
2026-08-15	Numbered thread formula Platform-specific	Added	Contested	The format was invented by a named human in 2014 and documented contemporaneously by a venture firm, a newspaper and a community wiki. Publishing it as anything other than contested would be an error the rest of this directory exists to argue against.
2026-08-15	One-point dilution Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Carried by two community rule sets as separate patterns that fire on the same text, and consistent with first-party search guidance treating low-value repetition as a quality problem. No measurement exists, so the grade stays at community-observed while severity reflects what the pattern costs a reader.
2026-08-15	Paragraph over-fragmentation Structural and syntactic	Added	Contested	Ships contested on the strength of the published error analysis, which shows this exact feature behaving as a corpus artifact. Paragraph count carried the largest gap in feature contribution between the classifier's two error types, and the human writing it misfired on had the same paragraph shape as the machine text it caught.
2026-08-15	Participial tack-on padding Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Reinhart measured 2024-era models and no later study reports the gap closing. The construction is still carried on Wikipedia's signs-of-AI-writing page with no decay note, and vale-ai-tells ships 68 surface forms of it.
2026-08-15	Paired-phrase coordination Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Measured at 1.9 times the human rate in 2024-era model output and carried by vale-ai-tells as a checkable rule. No published work reports the habit fading.
2026-08-15	2026 precision-hedge cluster Lexical	Added	Active	Active, and new. The extraction on 2026-08-14 puts precision and hedge vocabulary at the top of the frontier science split while the 2023 markers are absent from it. Juzek documents post-2022 lexical uptake continuing across languages, and Geng and Trotta explain the substitution mechanism: publicised markers decay and unpublicised ones keep rising.
2026-08-15	Promotional register in the wrong genre Semantic	Added	Active	Wikipedia documents the drift with dated examples, a named researcher describes the same effect as a genre glitch, and a vendor guidance page names unanchored claims from the writing side. Three independent descriptions of one behaviour.
2026-08-15	Pseudo-lexical labels Semantic	Added	Active	A journal retraction three days after publication, covered independently, with the mangled figure labels reproduced in the coverage. The entry is kept despite falling outside the text-only scope, and it declares that exception in its own description.
2026-08-15	Quality-assertion adjectives Lexical	Added	Contested	Contested. Named across four sources including the Kobak excess-word set and the LexA data, and simultaneously the native vocabulary of product marketing, statistics and systems engineering. The word alone signals genre rather than authorship, which is why the pattern is restricted to the marketing collocations.
2026-08-15	Real entity, fabricated work product Semantic	Added	Active	A newspaper published its own audit of the failure in May 2025, naming fake titles credited to real authors, a fabricated expert at a real university and invented quotes from a real person. Snopes and NPR corroborate the same section. Self-incriminating evidence, which is the strongest kind available here.
2026-08-15	The real question pivot Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active. slop-lint carries the framing family from a screened human baseline and vale-ai-tells ships a matching rule. Neither publishes a rate, so the density requirement of two pivots in one passage is a FeedSquad decision stated in the pattern rather than a measured cutoff.
2026-08-15	Redundant precaution Model register	Added	Active	Active and graded community-observed on 2026-08-15. The tellsign list names the closer directly, and Anthropic dated system prompts show the neighbouring habit being suppressed by instruction, which supports the pull without establishing a rate. Severity is low because the regulated case is common and legitimate, and because the repair is a deletion, not a rewrite. Pattern verified on 2026-08-15 against both specimens and against three ordinary sentences, including one about an insurer that mandates a dosing disclaimer.
2026-08-15	Refusal-text leakage Model register	Added	Active	Active on three independent records: the Amazon product titles reported in January 2024, NewsGuard listing chatbot error messages among the signals it uses to identify AI content farms, and Wikipedia deleting pages under G15 for the same sign. Pattern verified on 2026-08-15 against both specimens, against both repairs, and against three ordinary sentences including one about a refund request that was never fulfilled.
2026-08-15	Register collapse on borrowed phrasing Semantic	Added	Active	One incident, one press source, and a vendor denial that a language model was involved. That denial is why the grade is community-observed rather than corroborated, and the entry keeps the tell while declining to claim its cause.
2026-08-15	Restatement intro Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Carried as a checkable rule in one community rule set, and consistent with published search guidance on summarising without adding value. Ships active because the shape is produced by the workflow rather than by any single model habit, and nothing in the record suggests the workflow has changed.
2026-08-15	Peer-review praise register Lexical	Added	Fading	Fading. Liang measured the rise in reviews written between 2023 and 2024, and the vocabulary has since been named in every venue that discusses this, including conference policies. Yakura documents the same words entering unscripted human speech, which drains a word-level marker of information regardless of what any model does next.
2026-08-15	Satire laundered as fact Semantic	Added	Active	One press account of a search feature answering with material traceable to joke posts, followed by vendor restrictions. One source, so the grade stays community-observed, and the entry says which incident it rests on.
2026-08-15	Generic scene-setting opener Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Burned	Opened as burned. Content marketers taught this opener explicitly for a decade before chat products existed, and it is now the single most quoted example in popular guides, so human writers trip it constantly. The rule stays listed and stops firing, since a retired signal is information about the discourse.
2026-08-15	Uniform sentence cadence Structural and syntactic	Added	Contested	Ships contested. The direction of effect has published support, no human baseline exists to set a line, and the number most often attached to this measurement is arithmetically impossible under the formula it is credited to. Detector work also shows structural features of this kind carrying corpus artifacts rather than authorship.
2026-08-15	Sentence-opener repetition Structural and syntactic	Added	Contested	Ships contested. Two community rule sets carry the pattern and one of them exists to suppress it, but no study measures it, and the shape is produced deliberately by writers with a plain declarative style.
2026-08-15	Signposted conclusion Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Carried by three independent taxonomies, including the largest maintained public one, with no decay note on any of them. The heading forms remain shipped as checkable rules.
2026-08-15	Space-surrounded em dash Formatting	Added	Active	Active because it is the one dash check that survives the density argument. Wikipedia records that model dashes are usually surrounded by spaces, against the typographic guidance most human users of the mark already know. The pattern asks for two spaced dashes rather than one, so a single typing choice does not register. Regex verified on 2026-08-15 against its own specimen and against three negatives, one of them a spaced en dash in the British convention.
2026-08-15	Staccato fragment run Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Carried by three community sources, one of which implements it as a live rule. No measurement exists and none is claimed here. Severity stays low because the form is a working tool in several human registers.
2026-08-15	Stale fact stated as current Semantic	Added	Active	Wikipedia names undated present-tense claims and training-window behaviour among its cleanup signals, and its deletion criterion covers the explicit boilerplate. Two community documents, one behaviour, with the boundary between disclosed and undisclosed staleness stated in the entry.
2026-08-15	Structure announcement Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Carried by three independent lists and implemented as a live rule in one of them. Vendor prompts suppress over-formatting and several adjacent habits, but no published instruction names these invitations, so nothing suggests the pattern is fading.
2026-08-15	TL;DR box reflex Formatting	Added	Active	Active with a low grade and low severity, which is the honest pairing. One machine-checkable rule set carries heading rules for the announcement family, and the rest of the support is our own review queue, named as a source rather than dressed up as measurement. The rubric is gated on body length so that long-form summaries never register.
2026-08-15	Superlative stacking Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Contested	Opened as contested. The peer-reviewed evidence is a 2011 study of human deceptive reviews, which is a different claim from a machine signal, and the same paper found human judges at roughly chance on the task. The entry ships with that boundary stated and with a threshold declared as a review trigger.
2026-08-15	Template review with a swapped noun Platform-specific	Added	Active	One vendor measurement and one federal rule support the entry, which is corroboration across independent kinds of source rather than a single sighting. Severity is high because fake reviews carry money and regulatory consequences, not because the prose is dull.
2026-08-15	Template-and-scale sameness Platform-specific	Added	Active	A written platform policy defines the pattern, states the consequence in money, and explicitly permits AI-assisted work with an original voice. Two peer-reviewed papers set the boundaries: one showing that model prose is more uniform at population level, the other showing that uniformity-keyed detectors were learning artefacts. High severity because monetisation is at stake, and judged over ten items because nothing smaller is defensible.
2026-08-15	Terminal question bait Platform-specific	Added	Contested	LinkedIn names posts that expressly ask the community to engage via likes or reactions, and Mosseri acknowledged rising engagement bait on Threads. Neither names a soft closing question, so the entry ships contested: platforms enforce the explicit ask, and this is the softer cousin that no policy reaches.
2026-08-15	A testament to Lexical	Added	Fading	Fading. Named by four sources including the Wikipedia list, where editors treat it as a routine removal, and by the community linters. A phrase that trained editors strip automatically stops distinguishing between drafts.
2026-08-15	That-clause subjects Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Published at 2.6 times the human rate in 2024-era model output, with no later study reporting a change. Severity is set low because the effect size is the weakest in the source table and the construction is ordinary in several genres.
2026-08-15	Thread-opener boilerplate Platform-specific	Added	Burned	These openers are so publicised that human writers now use them ironically and assistants have largely stopped producing them unprompted. Signal value has collapsed. The entry stays in the dataset because retired signal is information, and burned status de-arms the rule so it does not fire.
2026-08-15	Timestamp wall Platform-specific	Added	Active	Shipped low severity with a weak source base stated openly. The confound is strong enough to be disqualifying on its own: several hosting platforms generate chapters automatically as a product feature, so the artefact may have nothing to do with how the show was made.
2026-08-15	Unnecessary tiny tables Formatting	Added	Active	Active but thin. The only support is one section of Wikipedia's style list, which says that in rare cases some models build unnecessary small tables and keeps dated examples. Severity is set to low to match single-source evidence, and the rubric carries four escape hatches so that correct small tables pass.
2026-08-15	Title Case headings Formatting	Added	Contested	Contested by construction. Wikipedia records the tendency and cites the 2025 study of heavy tool users, so the pattern is real in that corpus. It is also mandated by American editorial style, produced automatically by content management systems, and baked into slide templates, so the base rate in the affected genres is enormous. The pattern requires a standalone line of five or more words with no terminal punctuation, so running prose never registers. Regex verified on 2026-08-15 against its own specimen and four negatives.
2026-08-15	Translationese formal register Model register	Added	Active	Active and graded community-observed on 2026-08-15. The multilingual measurement establishes that the shift is not English-only, at 26 of 34 languages, and it is a preprint committed to EMNLP 2026. The shape-level detail comes from a single steering prompt for Bahasa Indonesia, carried as inverted evidence and never as sole support. No rate has been published for the register itself, so the entry claims a pattern and not a prevalence.
2026-08-15	Not X. Not Y. Just Z. Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active. Named directly by tropes.fyi and covered by slop-lint, whose molds were screened against a human baseline before shipping. No source reports the shape declining, and it survives paraphrase because it is a mold rather than a phrase.
2026-08-15	Undue significance inflation Semantic	Added	Active	Named in the largest maintained public taxonomy with its own shortcut and a words-to-watch list, and independently in a community pattern directory and a rule set. Three sources describing one move.
2026-08-15	Unenhanced repost Platform-specific	Added	Active	Three platforms carry written policy against this and state the consequence in money and reach. The severity is high because the enforcement is real and current, not because the writing is bad.
2026-08-15	Unfalsifiable byline Semantic	Added	Active	Two separate newsroom cases, in 2023 and 2025, documented by three outlets between them, with retractions in both. The second case also records that commercial detection tools cleared the copy, which is why this entry routes verification through payment and editorial trails instead.
2026-08-15	Unfilled placeholders Formatting	Added	Active	Active and high severity. Wikipedia keeps dated examples of citations published with an unresolved access date and with source and publisher slots left as literal strings, and criterion G15 treats the same class of artifact as grounds for speedy deletion. The pattern is anchored to bracketed slot names, screaming-case tokens and unresolved date fields, so ordinary lowercase identifiers do not register. Regex verified on 2026-08-15 against both specimens and three negatives.
2026-08-15	Unverifiable specific geography Semantic	Added	Active	Six outlets retracted work under one fabricated byline in 2025, and the trade coverage records nonexistent towns and payment friction as what exposed it after two detection tools had cleared the text. The check is a lookup, which makes it one of the few reliable ones here.
2026-08-15	Vague attribution Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active at high severity. Wikipedia names it with a dedicated shortcut, tropes.fyi lists vague attributions, and vale-ai-tells ships a rule with 61 tokens for the family. The severity reflects the consequence rather than the frequency: the sentence makes a factual claim and removes the means of checking it.
2026-08-15	Vendor markup artifacts Formatting	Added	Active	Active and high severity. Wikipedia catalogues the token families per vendor with dated article examples, and criterion G15 makes their presence grounds for speedy deletion because the page reached publication with no human review. The pattern is anchored to the full artifact rather than the bare word, so an article about these tokens does not register. Regex verified on 2026-08-15 against both specimens and three negatives, one of which mentions a token by name in ordinary prose.
2026-08-15	Volume signature Platform-specific	Added	Active	Three independent organisations in three fields detected their slop influx by rate rather than by reading, and each published what they had counted. That is the strongest corroboration available for any entry here, and it holds regardless of how the text was produced.
2026-08-15	Well-formed citation, no referent Semantic	Added	Active	Wikipedia's speedy-deletion criterion G15 names invalid identifiers as a sign, and court coverage records filings with citations that resolve to nothing. The pattern has an arithmetic component, which is rare in this dataset and makes it unusually cheap to check.
2026-08-14	Bolded lead-in on every list item Formatting	Added	Contested	Supported at model level by the ICML 2025 idiosyncrasies study and by Anthropic's dated system prompts, which instruct against exactly this shape. Undercut by OpenAI's documented API default of no Markdown, which relocates the tell from a model family to a product surface. Technical documentation has used definition-style bullets since long before 2022, so the base rate in the affected genres is high.
2026-08-14	The challenges-then-outlook closer Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Named by Wikipedia as a current content sign with its own shortcut and its own citation. No source reports it declining, and unlike a lexical marker it survives paraphrasing, because it is a shape rather than a phrase.
2026-08-14	Copula avoidance (serves as, stands as, functions as) Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Wikipedia lists the construction under language and grammar with no decay note, and the copula decline is reported in two separate corpora, academic abstracts and Wikipedia articles. No published measurement shows it fading.
2026-08-14	Excess-vocabulary cluster (delve, underscore, intricate) Lexical	Added	Fading	The Washington Post measured delve in roughly 1 in 1,000 publicly shared ChatGPT messages by July 2025, well below its 2023 peak. Yakura and colleagues found the same words rising in unscripted human speech after ChatGPT's release, with a preregistered experiment showing adoption after brief exposure. The cluster still measures something at corpus scale. It no longer separates one author from another.
2026-08-14	Echo restatement reply Platform-specific	Added	Active	The pattern is named verbatim in LinkedIn's own policy and is enforced on X through the reply-spam path. The threshold is provisional and flagged as such in the description; it is the weakest part of this entry and should be recalibrated once a reply corpus exists.
2026-08-14	Emoji used as document structure Formatting	Added	Contested	Opened as contested. Wikipedia lists the habit and says it is rarer now than it was, which points toward decay. The Washington Post measurement of emoji presence in chat messages points the other way, but measures a different thing. The human base rate on social platforms is enormous and long-standing, so the pattern cannot support a verdict about authorship on those surfaces.
2026-08-14	No first-person incident Semantic	Added	Active	Three platform policies name the absence of the creator's own insight as the enforcement trigger. Scope is deliberately narrow: it applies to first-person advice under a named byline, and the false-positive note lists the genres where absence of first person is the house rule.
2026-08-14	Raw markdown in a surface that does not render it Formatting	Added	Active	High precision as an artifact and honest about what it proves. It identifies where the text was composed rather than who composed it, which is why severity is moderate and not strong. Regex verified on 2026-08-14 against three positive and five negative strings, including a Python exponent and a thematic break.
2026-08-14	"It's not X, it's Y" Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active. Named by Wikipedia's editors as a current sign with three templates, reported by The Economist as a repeated model habit in a 2026 rewrite study, and given a precise linguistic taxonomy by Silvennoinen. The human base rate is real and the entry says so, which is why severity is moderate rather than strong.
2026-08-14	Rule of three used as padding Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Contested	Opened as contested. Wikipedia's guide names the pattern under WP:RO3 and The Economist reports models favouring three-item lists, but neither publishes a rate, and a separate research pass found no primary source assigning the figure to any model family. Classical rhetoric has treated the tricolon as a deliberate device since antiquity, so the base rate in edited human prose is high and unmeasured.
2026-08-14	Rhetorical question that answers itself Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Contested	Opened as contested, and the contest is on the record. Reinhart et al. in PNAS found questions among the features LLMs underuse relative to matched human prose, which is direct counter-evidence to a frequency-based version of this tell. Wikipedia's guide does not name it. The entry ships because the formulaic placement is worth reviewing, not because the evidence supports a verdict.
2026-08-14	Specificity vacuum Semantic	Added	Active	Named in some form by every platform policy reviewed and by the Wikipedia editor guide. It survives the decay argument that retires lexical tells, because it describes missing substance rather than surface style.
2026-08-14	Sycophantic opener Model register	Added	Active	Backed by peer-reviewed work on sycophancy as an RLHF artifact and by the Wikipedia editor guide's verbatim string list under communication intended for the user. Kept in the highest-precision family because the text is addressed to a prompter rather than a reader. Regex verified on 2026-08-14 against four positive and five negative strings; the negatives include the sentence-initial 'Of course the tradeoff is cost', which the punctuation requirement excludes.
2026-08-14	Significance inflation (underscores the importance) Lexical	Added	Active	Wikipedia's era buckets keep emphasizing and highlighting in the mid-2025 onward set, and record that Grok still overuses underscore as of 2026. No source reports the phrasing declining.

All entries Methodology

Changelog

Date	Entry	Event	Status	Rationale
2026-08-15	Not only X but also Y Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active. Wikipedia lists the negative-parallelism family as a current sign, and Silvennoinen gives the construction a precise grammar and separates it from the replacive form. The human base rate is high, which is why severity stays moderate and the entry says the signal lives in repetition.
2026-08-15	Think-of-it-as analogy reflex Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active at low severity. Two practitioner lists name the pattern and neither publishes a rate. The rule is a single narrow phrase family, which keeps the cost of a false hit close to zero.
2026-08-15	Anaphora abuse Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Contested	Opened as contested. tropes.fyi and vale-ai-tells both name stacked anaphora, but Burton records an unbroken teaching tradition and Heritage and Greatbatch measured the parallel shape winning applause in human political speech in 1986. Nobody has published a rate for either population, so the entry ships as a review trigger with the counter-evidence stated.
2026-08-15	Manufactured aphorism molds Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active at high severity. slop-lint screened each mold against roughly 60,000 words of human baseline and required two independent sightings before shipping it, which is a stronger method than any other list in this category offers. It is still a single repository, so the grade stays community-observed.
2026-08-15	Asserted obviousness Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active with low severity. Three practitioner lists carry the family, and none publishes a rate. The move itself is ancient, so the rule is restricted to four fixed phrases and the entry says why.
2026-08-15	Assistant closing offer Model register	Added	Active	Active on two community sources that were compiled separately: the Wikipedia guide to signs of AI-generated comments lists the strings, and vale-ai-tells ships them as a machine-checkable rule. Pattern verified on 2026-08-15 against both specimens and against three ordinary sentences, including a support reply that ends by inviting a question about an invoice.
2026-08-15	Assistant commit register Model register	Added	Active	Active but graded community-observed, because vale-ai-tells is the only taxonomy that covers commit messages as a surface and no measurement of the register exists. Wikipedia edit summaries carry the same shapes, which is corroboration of the pattern, not of a rate. Pattern verified on 2026-08-15 against both specimens and against three ordinary commit sentences, including one that documents a legacy column left in place on purpose.
2026-08-15	Authenticity vocabulary tic Platform-specific	Added	Active	The observation is reader-side folk knowledge with two first-party LinkedIn documents attached, which is why it ships active at low severity. It is a vocabulary tic and vocabulary tics decay fastest, so expect this one to weaken.
2026-08-15	Boldface in running prose Formatting	Added	Active	Active. The vendor evidence is first-party and dated: Anthropic publishes system prompts that instruct against over-formatting, which documents the tendency without measuring output. Wikipedia records the same habit in article space and names the training genres it comes from. The threshold is ours and says so, because no human baseline for bold density has been published.
2026-08-15	Both-sides affirmation Model register	Added	Active	Active on two peer-reviewed and preprint measurements that agree: ELEPHANT reports both-sides affirmation in 48 percent of cases across eleven models and face preservation 45 percentage points above the human rate, and the ICLR 2024 sycophancy work shows preference data rewarding agreement with the user. Judged by rubric and not by string match, because the pattern is a stance across a whole response and no string carries it.
2026-08-15	Broetry cadence Platform-specific	Added	Contested	The format is a documented human invention from 2017, taught in paid courses five years before an assistant could imitate it, and no LinkedIn policy has ever addressed line breaks. Contested is the honest shipping status: the shape is real and worth naming, its signal value is close to zero.
2026-08-15	Broken enumeration Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Documented in the November 2023 reporting on fabricated bylines, where a numbered list labelled every item number one, and still turning up in published material. Nothing in the record shows it fading, because it is a review failure rather than a writing habit.
2026-08-15	Canned conclusion phrases Lexical	Added	Contested	Contested. Named by four independent lists, and simultaneously the standard closing move taught in school essay instruction and required by the structure of an abstract, an executive summary or a legal brief. The signal is about the genre it appears in more than about the sentence.
2026-08-15	Canned notability emphasis Semantic	Added	Active	Wikipedia names the pattern, quotes examples from 2025 revisions and records that it is more common in later models. Single-source, so the grade stays community-observed, and the pattern is written narrowly because the phrasing overlaps with ordinary publicity writing.
2026-08-15	Capability-release verbs Lexical	Added	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.
2026-08-15	Carousel cover promise Platform-specific	Added	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.
2026-08-15	Cataphoric forecasting Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Implemented as a live rule in one community rule set and listed in another, with no report of the habit fading. Severity is low because the move is ordinary in speech and in anything transcribed from it.
2026-08-15	Collaborative address to the reader Model register	Added	Active	Active on Wikipedia primary text: criterion G15 names collaborative address as a sign of communication intended for the user, and the signs-of-AI-writing guide catalogues the same strings at prose level. Pattern verified on 2026-08-15 against both specimens and against three ordinary sentences, including a workbook line that hands the reader a template, which the noun list excludes.
2026-08-15	Confident arithmetic error Semantic	Added	Active	Documented in a news outlet's own correction record and covered by two independent outlets, one of which reported the correction count. The failure recurs wherever numeric copy is published without a numerate reader in the loop.
2026-08-15	Confident misattribution Semantic	Added	Active	One reachable primary that contradicts a widely repeated claim about its own author. Single source, so the grade is community-observed, and the worked example is chosen because a reader can check it in a minute.
2026-08-15	Contraction avoidance Structural and syntactic	Added	Contested	Ships contested. Wikipedia lists formal prose in itself among its ineffective indicators, and readers treat contractions as a warmth marker, which makes the rate a fact about styling rather than about effort.
2026-08-15	Curiosity-gap withholding Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Contested	Opened as contested. The peer-reviewed anchor documents curiosity-gap headlines spreading through human digital publishing in the early 2010s, so the shape carries no authorship signal at all. It ships because a headline whose payload never appears is worth a review pass, and the entry says plainly that the origin is human.
2026-08-15	Curly quotes in plain-text registers Formatting	Added	Contested	Contested from the start. Wikipedia lists the habit and immediately lists the confounds, naming Microsoft Word, the macOS and iOS defaults, Chicago style and citation tools, and stating that two widely used model families typically do not produce curly marks at all. The pattern was narrowed to require a curly quotation mark and a curly apostrophe together, so a lone autocorrected apostrophe does not register. Regex verified on 2026-08-15 against its own specimen and three negatives.
2026-08-15	Decorative horizontal rules Formatting	Added	Active	Active and cheap to check. Wikipedia documents the habit with dated article examples in which a break sits under every section. The pattern requires two rules within 800 characters, so a single genuine scene break never registers. Regex verified on 2026-08-15 against its own specimen and three negatives, one of them a text carrying exactly one break.
2026-08-15	Decorative symbol strings Formatting	Added	Active	Active with low severity, because the human base rate on social surfaces is enormous. Microsoft names the same decorations in guidance written for human copywriters, which is a vendor recording the pattern without measuring it. The character class is narrow: arrow glyphs, runs of two or more stars, and three or more stacked exclamation or question marks. Regex verified on 2026-08-15 against its own specimen and three negatives.
2026-08-15	Depth-claim adjectives Lexical	Added	Active	Active. Present in the Kobak excess-word set and current across three community taxonomies, with nothing reporting decline. Severity is low because the adjectives are common in honest writing and the pattern only catches the fixed phrases.
2026-08-15	Description-content mismatch Platform-specific	Added	Active	YouTube names misleading descriptions in written policy and enforces them under spam, which makes this a documented platform rule rather than a taste judgment. Medium severity because the honest and the dishonest versions sit close together and the policy itself sets a high bar.
2026-08-15	Domain-blind sentence Semantic	Added	Active	The 2023 fake-byline investigation and its trade-press follow-up both identify the impossible instruction as the sentence that broke the story. The pattern survives model improvement because it comes from having no practice rather than from weak language.
2026-08-15	Domain metaphor nouns Lexical	Added	Contested	Contested from the start. Wikipedia lists the family, vale-ai-tells ships rules for it and the LexA per-language data carries the vocabulary, but ecosystem is a defined technical term in two separate fields and the phrase has a documented pre-2022 business register. Listed because the metaphor is worth noticing, graded so that nobody treats a single hit as meaning anything.
2026-08-15	Double-hyphen dash Formatting	Added	Active	Active and cheap. Two independent taxonomies list the form, and the pattern is anchored to a letter on both sides so that command-line flags, which begin with a space and two hyphens, never register. Regex verified on 2026-08-15 against its own specimen and against three negatives including a flag and a chained flag argument.
2026-08-15	Elegant variation Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Carried by the largest maintained public taxonomy under its own shortcut, by a pattern directory and by a teaching-press account, with a stated decoding mechanism behind it. No published work reports it fading.
2026-08-15	Em-dash density Formatting	Added	Contested	Opened as contested. The population shift is measured and holds up: Czuma reports em dash presence in medRxiv Discussion sections rising from 4.23 to 11.58 percent with an odds ratio of 2.96, and its author says the measure does not work per paper. Against that, the published human range of 0.33 to 17.12 per 1,000 words contains every model mean measured so far, two of twelve models emit none at all, and OpenAI shipped suppression in GPT-5.1 in November 2025. A per-document verdict is not available from any of it.
2026-08-15	Emphatic adverbs Lexical	Added	Active	Active, and unusually well evidenced for a word-level entry. Anthropic dated the suppression instruction across three model releases between May and July 2026, which places the tendency in current systems by the vendor own account. The pattern is nonetheless narrow, because the words themselves are ordinary English.
2026-08-15	Emphatic italics Formatting	Added	Active	Active and deliberately weak. The peer-reviewed support is a classifier study showing that model families differ in formatting habits, which is aggregate evidence from a dated snapshot rather than a per-document test. A second candidate entry naming one family by its italics was merged in here, because both rested on that one finding. The threshold is ours and says so.
2026-08-15	Empty preamble padding Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Named as a quality problem in current first-party search rater guidance and carried by two independent community taxonomies. Nothing in the record suggests the habit is weakening.
2026-08-15	Episode dive opener Platform-specific	Added	Active	Still common and still uninformative on its own, so it ships active at the lowest severity. The source base is our own corpus, since the external material on podcast descriptions is entirely tool marketing.
2026-08-15	Essay scaffolding in a social post Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Recorded in FeedSquad agent drafts during the index build on 14 and 15 August 2026. No external taxonomy carries the pattern, so the entry ships at the lowest evidence grade with its corpus named, and severity is low because the shape is competence in the register it came from.
2026-08-15	Explicit engagement request Platform-specific	Added	Active	Three platforms define this in first-party policy text and state the consequence, which is demotion or lost promotion rather than removal. Meta has run the policy since December 2017. Nothing in the evidence suggests the behaviour has stopped, so the entry ships active at high severity.
2026-08-15	Fabricated precision Semantic	Added	Active	Our own corpus only. During the research pass for this index, widely repeated platform-performance figures were traced back and every one of them ended at a vendor or marketing post rather than at a first-party document. No external taxonomy names the pattern, which is why the grade is feedsquad-observed.
2026-08-15	False range Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active. tropes.fyi names the pattern and the anti-slop-writing list carries it as a structural rule. That second list is an evasion prompt and is marked as one, so tropes.fyi is the independent support and the grade stays community-observed.
2026-08-15	False-suspense transition Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active. Named by tropes.fyi and implemented as a rule family in vale-ai-tells. Neither source publishes a rate, which is what the community-observed grade records, and no source reports the shape declining.
2026-08-15	False vulnerability Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active. tropes.fyi names the pattern and vale-ai-tells covers the surrounding register. Neither publishes a rate. Our own drafts show the opener recurring from a single prompt template, which is recorded as an observation about our generations and not as a measurement of anyone else.
2026-08-15	Figurative verb family Lexical	Added	Active	Active, on thin evidence. Two independent rule sets carry the family and no published study measures it, so the entry ships at low severity with the grade stated. It is listed because the substitution test is easy to run and useful, not because anyone has counted it.
2026-08-15	Formal transition crutch Lexical	Added	Active	Wikipedia keeps the formal connectives in its current list, vale-ai-tells ships machine-checkable rules for them, and additionally is one of the three items named by 11 of the 13 independent lists we normalised. Geng and Trotta show publicised markers decaying faster than unpublicised ones, so this entry should be expected to move.
2026-08-15	Fractal summaries Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Named in two independent community rule sets and unmeasured anywhere. Nothing in the vendor record suggests it has been trained out, and the sentence-level markers that accompany it are still shipped as checkable rules.
2026-08-15	Generic affirmation comment Platform-specific	Added	Active	LinkedIn defines automated comments in a first-party newsroom post and describes the enforcement it applies, and the public X algorithm repo carries slop labels enforced through the reply-spam path. Both target volume rather than wording, which is how this entry is scored.
2026-08-15	Generic outlet identity Platform-specific	Added	Active	One organisation publishes the framework and the site counts, so the grade stays community-observed even though the criteria are written down. Severity is high because the entry is about provenance rather than taste, and a reader acting on an unattributable outlet carries real risk.
2026-08-15	GPT-4o creative-register cluster Lexical	Added	Fading	Fading. The family is tied to the GPT-4o generation that Reinhart measured, and the frontier science split we extracted in August 2026 shows a different profile entirely. The vocabulary also sits on published avoid lists, which is the condition under which a marker stops separating anyone from anyone.
2026-08-15	Hashtag wall Platform-specific	Added	Fading	Instagram-era tag stuffing was taught as marketing orthodoxy for a decade and plenty of accounts still run the playbook by hand, so the shape says little about how a caption was produced. It ships fading rather than active: still visible, no longer informative, and de-armed by that status so it does not fire in the lint.
2026-08-15	Hedging preamble Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Contested	Opened as contested. Four independent lists carry the family, including Wikipedia and a professional editing service, but the same formulas appear in the Academic Formulas List as taught academic register. Hedging is a documented obligation in academic, medical and legal writing, so the entry ships with the contest on the record.
2026-08-15	Humblebrag parable post Platform-specific	Added	Active	No external source documents this shape, so it ships on our own corpus and is graded accordingly. It is low severity because the human origin is strong: the broetry tradition invented the anecdote-reversal-lesson post and still teaches it.
2026-08-15	Identical cross-post Platform-specific	Added	Active	This is a genuine observation from FeedSquad's own multi-platform publishing, where the same draft can be pushed to four surfaces in one action, and it is graded on that corpus rather than dressed up with an external citation. Medium severity because the failure is visible to readers and cheap to fix.
2026-08-15	Imagine-a-world opener Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Burned	Opened as burned. The opener is quoted in every popular guide to spotting machine prose and in the jokes about them, so human writers now trip it knowingly while the earnest use has thinned out. Geng and Trotta measured exactly this decay for a publicised lexical marker. The rule stays in the dataset and stops firing, because retired signal is still information.
2026-08-15	Importance-inflation adjectives Lexical	Added	Active	The family is current on the Wikipedia list, carries rules in vale-ai-tells and slop-lint, and sits in the Kobak excess-word set. No source reports it declining.
2026-08-15	Institutional abstraction verbs Lexical	Added	Active	Active. The verbs are in the Kobak excess-word set and carry current rules in vale-ai-tells, and nothing in the evidence base reports them declining. Severity is medium because the abstraction hides content rather than merely decorating it.
2026-08-15	Internal factual contradiction Semantic	Added	Active	Ships active on the mechanism rather than on a measurement. The March 2026 coalition letter to a platform is cited for the register and the population it describes, and it does not attest a contradiction inside a single document, so the evidence grade is our own corpus. Figures circulating alongside that story could not be traced to a primary source and are not used here.
2026-08-15	Citation with invalid temporality Semantic	Added	Active	One community source names it, and the check itself is arithmetic rather than interpretive, so the entry ships on a single citation with that stated. Nothing else in this dataset can be verified as cheaply.
2026-08-15	Invented concept labels Semantic	Added	Active	Named by one community pattern directory and nowhere else in our source set, so the grade is community-observed and the entry says so. The acknowledgement test is what keeps it from condemning ordinary coinage.
2026-08-15	Invented internal references Semantic	Added	Active	Wikipedia documents invented policy citations on its page about machine-written comments, with its own shortcut and quoted examples. Single-source, so the grade is community-observed, and the entry is scoped to internal rule sets to keep it distinct from the citation entries.
2026-08-15	Confident report, no reproducible artifact Semantic	Added	Active	A widely reported programme closure in January 2026, covered by two independent outlets, with the maintainer describing a flood of machine-written reports. Rates circulating with that story could not be confirmed in the cited coverage and are not used here.
2026-08-15	Journey and navigation metaphors Lexical	Added	Fading	Marked fading because the family appears on every published avoid list, including the two gists in the sources, and Geng and Trotta measured publicised markers losing frequency soon after they became famous. A word that everyone has been told to remove tells you about the editing, not the drafting.
2026-08-15	Knowledge-cutoff disclaimer Model register	Added	Active	Active on Wikipedia criterion G15, which names cutoff disclaimers among the examples of communication intended for the user, and on the tellsign phrase list, which carries the same wordings independently. Pattern verified on 2026-08-15 against both specimens and against three ordinary sentences, including one about training records that end in 2019.
2026-08-15	Latinate quantity flourish Lexical	Added	Active	Named by three independent community lists including one whose own purpose is inverted, which is recorded on the source. No published measurement exists for this family, so the grade stays community-observed and the severity stays low.
2026-08-15	Laundered statistic Semantic	Added	Active	Two worked examples with reachable primaries: a benchmark result circulating as a general effect, and a measurement of new articles circulating as a measurement of the web. Both originals state their scope plainly, which is what makes the drift visible.
2026-08-15	Listicle in a trench coat Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Named in one taxonomy and unmeasured anywhere. Ships active because the shape is common in currently published material, and low severity because plenty of good writing is legitimately list-shaped.
2026-08-15	Low-profile speculation Semantic	Added	Active	Wikipedia names the phrasing and quotes dated article revisions using it where no source existed. One source, so the grade is community-observed. The check is cheap, which is why the entry is deterministic rather than a rubric.
2026-08-15	Magic adverbs Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active. tropes.fyi names the adverb family directly and vale-ai-tells ships figurative and inevitability rules that catch neighbouring forms. Neither publishes a rate, so the grade stays community-observed and severity stays low.
2026-08-15	Manufactured rage-bait take Platform-specific	Added	Contested	X's policy reaches the coordinated case and says nothing about a lone provocative post, and intent is not observable from one text. Contested is the only honest status for a tell whose definition depends on a motive nobody can see.
2026-08-15	Manufactured relatability Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active at low severity. Two practitioner lists carry the family and neither publishes a rate. The phrases are also ordinary spoken English, which is why the rule is restricted to four fixed openers.
2026-08-15	Measured model idiolect Model register	Added	Contested	Shipped as contested on 2026-08-15. The underlying measurement is peer-reviewed and strong at corpus level. What is disputed is the inference people draw from it, that one document can be traced to a named product, and that inference has no support in the paper it cites. The entry exists to state the boundary. Snapshot-dated to the ICML 2025 collection, and the two vendor documents cited show the chat surface changing release by release.
2026-08-15	Mic-drop closer Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active. Three practitioner sources carry the family, one of them as a rule with a 63-token vocabulary list. None publishes a rate, and the closing device itself is ancient, so the grade is community-observed and the rubric requires four conditions rather than one.
2026-08-15	Model self-insertion Model register	Added	Active	Active on Wikipedia criterion G15, which names self-insertion among the three signs, and on the vale-ai-tells self-reference rule, which was written independently against the same strings. Pattern verified on 2026-08-15 against both specimens and against three ordinary sentences, including one about a team that trained a large language model on ten years of tickets.
2026-08-15	Moralizing closer Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active at low severity. Two practitioner lists carry the family and neither publishes a rate. The moralising closer is also an old and legitimate genre convention, which the rubric excludes by name rather than by taste.
2026-08-15	Multilingual lexical uptake Lexical	Added	Active	Active. Juzek measures uptake in 26 of 34 languages and the companion dataset covers them; Liang and colleagues find the same shift in consumer complaints, corporate communications and United Nations press releases at population scale. The source is a preprint committed to EMNLP 2026 and is labelled as such on the entry.
2026-08-15	Nominalization overload Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	The only published measurement of the pattern is Reinhart, which found it at roughly twice the human rate in 2024-era models. Nothing since reports the gap closing, and no vendor documentation names the construction as suppressed.
2026-08-15	Unanchored novelty superlatives Lexical	Added	Active	Named by four independent lists in the harvest and by Microsoft in first-party marketing guidance. Nothing reports it fading, and the low severity reflects how much ordinary promotional copy shares the register.
2026-08-15	Numbered thread formula Platform-specific	Added	Contested	The format was invented by a named human in 2014 and documented contemporaneously by a venture firm, a newspaper and a community wiki. Publishing it as anything other than contested would be an error the rest of this directory exists to argue against.
2026-08-15	One-point dilution Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Carried by two community rule sets as separate patterns that fire on the same text, and consistent with first-party search guidance treating low-value repetition as a quality problem. No measurement exists, so the grade stays at community-observed while severity reflects what the pattern costs a reader.
2026-08-15	Paragraph over-fragmentation Structural and syntactic	Added	Contested	Ships contested on the strength of the published error analysis, which shows this exact feature behaving as a corpus artifact. Paragraph count carried the largest gap in feature contribution between the classifier's two error types, and the human writing it misfired on had the same paragraph shape as the machine text it caught.
2026-08-15	Participial tack-on padding Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Reinhart measured 2024-era models and no later study reports the gap closing. The construction is still carried on Wikipedia's signs-of-AI-writing page with no decay note, and vale-ai-tells ships 68 surface forms of it.
2026-08-15	Paired-phrase coordination Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Measured at 1.9 times the human rate in 2024-era model output and carried by vale-ai-tells as a checkable rule. No published work reports the habit fading.
2026-08-15	2026 precision-hedge cluster Lexical	Added	Active	Active, and new. The extraction on 2026-08-14 puts precision and hedge vocabulary at the top of the frontier science split while the 2023 markers are absent from it. Juzek documents post-2022 lexical uptake continuing across languages, and Geng and Trotta explain the substitution mechanism: publicised markers decay and unpublicised ones keep rising.
2026-08-15	Promotional register in the wrong genre Semantic	Added	Active	Wikipedia documents the drift with dated examples, a named researcher describes the same effect as a genre glitch, and a vendor guidance page names unanchored claims from the writing side. Three independent descriptions of one behaviour.
2026-08-15	Pseudo-lexical labels Semantic	Added	Active	A journal retraction three days after publication, covered independently, with the mangled figure labels reproduced in the coverage. The entry is kept despite falling outside the text-only scope, and it declares that exception in its own description.
2026-08-15	Quality-assertion adjectives Lexical	Added	Contested	Contested. Named across four sources including the Kobak excess-word set and the LexA data, and simultaneously the native vocabulary of product marketing, statistics and systems engineering. The word alone signals genre rather than authorship, which is why the pattern is restricted to the marketing collocations.
2026-08-15	Real entity, fabricated work product Semantic	Added	Active	A newspaper published its own audit of the failure in May 2025, naming fake titles credited to real authors, a fabricated expert at a real university and invented quotes from a real person. Snopes and NPR corroborate the same section. Self-incriminating evidence, which is the strongest kind available here.
2026-08-15	The real question pivot Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active. slop-lint carries the framing family from a screened human baseline and vale-ai-tells ships a matching rule. Neither publishes a rate, so the density requirement of two pivots in one passage is a FeedSquad decision stated in the pattern rather than a measured cutoff.
2026-08-15	Redundant precaution Model register	Added	Active	Active and graded community-observed on 2026-08-15. The tellsign list names the closer directly, and Anthropic dated system prompts show the neighbouring habit being suppressed by instruction, which supports the pull without establishing a rate. Severity is low because the regulated case is common and legitimate, and because the repair is a deletion, not a rewrite. Pattern verified on 2026-08-15 against both specimens and against three ordinary sentences, including one about an insurer that mandates a dosing disclaimer.
2026-08-15	Refusal-text leakage Model register	Added	Active	Active on three independent records: the Amazon product titles reported in January 2024, NewsGuard listing chatbot error messages among the signals it uses to identify AI content farms, and Wikipedia deleting pages under G15 for the same sign. Pattern verified on 2026-08-15 against both specimens, against both repairs, and against three ordinary sentences including one about a refund request that was never fulfilled.
2026-08-15	Register collapse on borrowed phrasing Semantic	Added	Active	One incident, one press source, and a vendor denial that a language model was involved. That denial is why the grade is community-observed rather than corroborated, and the entry keeps the tell while declining to claim its cause.
2026-08-15	Restatement intro Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Carried as a checkable rule in one community rule set, and consistent with published search guidance on summarising without adding value. Ships active because the shape is produced by the workflow rather than by any single model habit, and nothing in the record suggests the workflow has changed.
2026-08-15	Peer-review praise register Lexical	Added	Fading	Fading. Liang measured the rise in reviews written between 2023 and 2024, and the vocabulary has since been named in every venue that discusses this, including conference policies. Yakura documents the same words entering unscripted human speech, which drains a word-level marker of information regardless of what any model does next.
2026-08-15	Satire laundered as fact Semantic	Added	Active	One press account of a search feature answering with material traceable to joke posts, followed by vendor restrictions. One source, so the grade stays community-observed, and the entry says which incident it rests on.
2026-08-15	Generic scene-setting opener Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Burned	Opened as burned. Content marketers taught this opener explicitly for a decade before chat products existed, and it is now the single most quoted example in popular guides, so human writers trip it constantly. The rule stays listed and stops firing, since a retired signal is information about the discourse.
2026-08-15	Uniform sentence cadence Structural and syntactic	Added	Contested	Ships contested. The direction of effect has published support, no human baseline exists to set a line, and the number most often attached to this measurement is arithmetically impossible under the formula it is credited to. Detector work also shows structural features of this kind carrying corpus artifacts rather than authorship.
2026-08-15	Sentence-opener repetition Structural and syntactic	Added	Contested	Ships contested. Two community rule sets carry the pattern and one of them exists to suppress it, but no study measures it, and the shape is produced deliberately by writers with a plain declarative style.
2026-08-15	Signposted conclusion Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Carried by three independent taxonomies, including the largest maintained public one, with no decay note on any of them. The heading forms remain shipped as checkable rules.
2026-08-15	Space-surrounded em dash Formatting	Added	Active	Active because it is the one dash check that survives the density argument. Wikipedia records that model dashes are usually surrounded by spaces, against the typographic guidance most human users of the mark already know. The pattern asks for two spaced dashes rather than one, so a single typing choice does not register. Regex verified on 2026-08-15 against its own specimen and against three negatives, one of them a spaced en dash in the British convention.
2026-08-15	Staccato fragment run Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Carried by three community sources, one of which implements it as a live rule. No measurement exists and none is claimed here. Severity stays low because the form is a working tool in several human registers.
2026-08-15	Stale fact stated as current Semantic	Added	Active	Wikipedia names undated present-tense claims and training-window behaviour among its cleanup signals, and its deletion criterion covers the explicit boilerplate. Two community documents, one behaviour, with the boundary between disclosed and undisclosed staleness stated in the entry.
2026-08-15	Structure announcement Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Carried by three independent lists and implemented as a live rule in one of them. Vendor prompts suppress over-formatting and several adjacent habits, but no published instruction names these invitations, so nothing suggests the pattern is fading.
2026-08-15	TL;DR box reflex Formatting	Added	Active	Active with a low grade and low severity, which is the honest pairing. One machine-checkable rule set carries heading rules for the announcement family, and the rest of the support is our own review queue, named as a source rather than dressed up as measurement. The rubric is gated on body length so that long-form summaries never register.
2026-08-15	Superlative stacking Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Contested	Opened as contested. The peer-reviewed evidence is a 2011 study of human deceptive reviews, which is a different claim from a machine signal, and the same paper found human judges at roughly chance on the task. The entry ships with that boundary stated and with a threshold declared as a review trigger.
2026-08-15	Template review with a swapped noun Platform-specific	Added	Active	One vendor measurement and one federal rule support the entry, which is corroboration across independent kinds of source rather than a single sighting. Severity is high because fake reviews carry money and regulatory consequences, not because the prose is dull.
2026-08-15	Template-and-scale sameness Platform-specific	Added	Active	A written platform policy defines the pattern, states the consequence in money, and explicitly permits AI-assisted work with an original voice. Two peer-reviewed papers set the boundaries: one showing that model prose is more uniform at population level, the other showing that uniformity-keyed detectors were learning artefacts. High severity because monetisation is at stake, and judged over ten items because nothing smaller is defensible.
2026-08-15	Terminal question bait Platform-specific	Added	Contested	LinkedIn names posts that expressly ask the community to engage via likes or reactions, and Mosseri acknowledged rising engagement bait on Threads. Neither names a soft closing question, so the entry ships contested: platforms enforce the explicit ask, and this is the softer cousin that no policy reaches.
2026-08-15	A testament to Lexical	Added	Fading	Fading. Named by four sources including the Wikipedia list, where editors treat it as a routine removal, and by the community linters. A phrase that trained editors strip automatically stops distinguishing between drafts.
2026-08-15	That-clause subjects Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Published at 2.6 times the human rate in 2024-era model output, with no later study reporting a change. Severity is set low because the effect size is the weakest in the source table and the construction is ordinary in several genres.
2026-08-15	Thread-opener boilerplate Platform-specific	Added	Burned	These openers are so publicised that human writers now use them ironically and assistants have largely stopped producing them unprompted. Signal value has collapsed. The entry stays in the dataset because retired signal is information, and burned status de-arms the rule so it does not fire.
2026-08-15	Timestamp wall Platform-specific	Added	Active	Shipped low severity with a weak source base stated openly. The confound is strong enough to be disqualifying on its own: several hosting platforms generate chapters automatically as a product feature, so the artefact may have nothing to do with how the show was made.
2026-08-15	Unnecessary tiny tables Formatting	Added	Active	Active but thin. The only support is one section of Wikipedia's style list, which says that in rare cases some models build unnecessary small tables and keeps dated examples. Severity is set to low to match single-source evidence, and the rubric carries four escape hatches so that correct small tables pass.
2026-08-15	Title Case headings Formatting	Added	Contested	Contested by construction. Wikipedia records the tendency and cites the 2025 study of heavy tool users, so the pattern is real in that corpus. It is also mandated by American editorial style, produced automatically by content management systems, and baked into slide templates, so the base rate in the affected genres is enormous. The pattern requires a standalone line of five or more words with no terminal punctuation, so running prose never registers. Regex verified on 2026-08-15 against its own specimen and four negatives.
2026-08-15	Translationese formal register Model register	Added	Active	Active and graded community-observed on 2026-08-15. The multilingual measurement establishes that the shift is not English-only, at 26 of 34 languages, and it is a preprint committed to EMNLP 2026. The shape-level detail comes from a single steering prompt for Bahasa Indonesia, carried as inverted evidence and never as sole support. No rate has been published for the register itself, so the entry claims a pattern and not a prevalence.
2026-08-15	Not X. Not Y. Just Z. Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active. Named directly by tropes.fyi and covered by slop-lint, whose molds were screened against a human baseline before shipping. No source reports the shape declining, and it survives paraphrase because it is a mold rather than a phrase.
2026-08-15	Undue significance inflation Semantic	Added	Active	Named in the largest maintained public taxonomy with its own shortcut and a words-to-watch list, and independently in a community pattern directory and a rule set. Three sources describing one move.
2026-08-15	Unenhanced repost Platform-specific	Added	Active	Three platforms carry written policy against this and state the consequence in money and reach. The severity is high because the enforcement is real and current, not because the writing is bad.
2026-08-15	Unfalsifiable byline Semantic	Added	Active	Two separate newsroom cases, in 2023 and 2025, documented by three outlets between them, with retractions in both. The second case also records that commercial detection tools cleared the copy, which is why this entry routes verification through payment and editorial trails instead.
2026-08-15	Unfilled placeholders Formatting	Added	Active	Active and high severity. Wikipedia keeps dated examples of citations published with an unresolved access date and with source and publisher slots left as literal strings, and criterion G15 treats the same class of artifact as grounds for speedy deletion. The pattern is anchored to bracketed slot names, screaming-case tokens and unresolved date fields, so ordinary lowercase identifiers do not register. Regex verified on 2026-08-15 against both specimens and three negatives.
2026-08-15	Unverifiable specific geography Semantic	Added	Active	Six outlets retracted work under one fabricated byline in 2025, and the trade coverage records nonexistent towns and payment friction as what exposed it after two detection tools had cleared the text. The check is a lookup, which makes it one of the few reliable ones here.
2026-08-15	Vague attribution Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active at high severity. Wikipedia names it with a dedicated shortcut, tropes.fyi lists vague attributions, and vale-ai-tells ships a rule with 61 tokens for the family. The severity reflects the consequence rather than the frequency: the sentence makes a factual claim and removes the means of checking it.
2026-08-15	Vendor markup artifacts Formatting	Added	Active	Active and high severity. Wikipedia catalogues the token families per vendor with dated article examples, and criterion G15 makes their presence grounds for speedy deletion because the page reached publication with no human review. The pattern is anchored to the full artifact rather than the bare word, so an article about these tokens does not register. Regex verified on 2026-08-15 against both specimens and three negatives, one of which mentions a token by name in ordinary prose.
2026-08-15	Volume signature Platform-specific	Added	Active	Three independent organisations in three fields detected their slop influx by rate rather than by reading, and each published what they had counted. That is the strongest corroboration available for any entry here, and it holds regardless of how the text was produced.
2026-08-15	Well-formed citation, no referent Semantic	Added	Active	Wikipedia's speedy-deletion criterion G15 names invalid identifiers as a sign, and court coverage records filings with citations that resolve to nothing. The pattern has an arithmetic component, which is rare in this dataset and makes it unusually cheap to check.
2026-08-14	Bolded lead-in on every list item Formatting	Added	Contested	Supported at model level by the ICML 2025 idiosyncrasies study and by Anthropic's dated system prompts, which instruct against exactly this shape. Undercut by OpenAI's documented API default of no Markdown, which relocates the tell from a model family to a product surface. Technical documentation has used definition-style bullets since long before 2022, so the base rate in the affected genres is high.
2026-08-14	The challenges-then-outlook closer Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Named by Wikipedia as a current content sign with its own shortcut and its own citation. No source reports it declining, and unlike a lexical marker it survives paraphrasing, because it is a shape rather than a phrase.
2026-08-14	Copula avoidance (serves as, stands as, functions as) Structural and syntactic	Added	Active	Wikipedia lists the construction under language and grammar with no decay note, and the copula decline is reported in two separate corpora, academic abstracts and Wikipedia articles. No published measurement shows it fading.
2026-08-14	Excess-vocabulary cluster (delve, underscore, intricate) Lexical	Added	Fading	The Washington Post measured delve in roughly 1 in 1,000 publicly shared ChatGPT messages by July 2025, well below its 2023 peak. Yakura and colleagues found the same words rising in unscripted human speech after ChatGPT's release, with a preregistered experiment showing adoption after brief exposure. The cluster still measures something at corpus scale. It no longer separates one author from another.
2026-08-14	Echo restatement reply Platform-specific	Added	Active	The pattern is named verbatim in LinkedIn's own policy and is enforced on X through the reply-spam path. The threshold is provisional and flagged as such in the description; it is the weakest part of this entry and should be recalibrated once a reply corpus exists.
2026-08-14	Emoji used as document structure Formatting	Added	Contested	Opened as contested. Wikipedia lists the habit and says it is rarer now than it was, which points toward decay. The Washington Post measurement of emoji presence in chat messages points the other way, but measures a different thing. The human base rate on social platforms is enormous and long-standing, so the pattern cannot support a verdict about authorship on those surfaces.
2026-08-14	No first-person incident Semantic	Added	Active	Three platform policies name the absence of the creator's own insight as the enforcement trigger. Scope is deliberately narrow: it applies to first-person advice under a named byline, and the false-positive note lists the genres where absence of first person is the house rule.
2026-08-14	Raw markdown in a surface that does not render it Formatting	Added	Active	High precision as an artifact and honest about what it proves. It identifies where the text was composed rather than who composed it, which is why severity is moderate and not strong. Regex verified on 2026-08-14 against three positive and five negative strings, including a Python exponent and a thematic break.
2026-08-14	"It's not X, it's Y" Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Active	Opened as active. Named by Wikipedia's editors as a current sign with three templates, reported by The Economist as a repeated model habit in a 2026 rewrite study, and given a precise linguistic taxonomy by Silvennoinen. The human base rate is real and the entry says so, which is why severity is moderate rather than strong.
2026-08-14	Rule of three used as padding Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Contested	Opened as contested. Wikipedia's guide names the pattern under WP:RO3 and The Economist reports models favouring three-item lists, but neither publishes a rate, and a separate research pass found no primary source assigning the figure to any model family. Classical rhetoric has treated the tricolon as a deliberate device since antiquity, so the base rate in edited human prose is high and unmeasured.
2026-08-14	Rhetorical question that answers itself Rhetorical and discourse	Added	Contested	Opened as contested, and the contest is on the record. Reinhart et al. in PNAS found questions among the features LLMs underuse relative to matched human prose, which is direct counter-evidence to a frequency-based version of this tell. Wikipedia's guide does not name it. The entry ships because the formulaic placement is worth reviewing, not because the evidence supports a verdict.
2026-08-14	Specificity vacuum Semantic	Added	Active	Named in some form by every platform policy reviewed and by the Wikipedia editor guide. It survives the decay argument that retires lexical tells, because it describes missing substance rather than surface style.
2026-08-14	Sycophantic opener Model register	Added	Active	Backed by peer-reviewed work on sycophancy as an RLHF artifact and by the Wikipedia editor guide's verbatim string list under communication intended for the user. Kept in the highest-precision family because the text is addressed to a prompter rather than a reader. Regex verified on 2026-08-14 against four positive and five negative strings; the negatives include the sentence-initial 'Of course the tradeoff is cost', which the punctuation requirement excludes.
2026-08-14	Significance inflation (underscores the importance) Lexical	Added	Active	Wikipedia's era buckets keep emphasizing and highlighting in the mid-2025 onward set, and record that Grok still overuses underscore as of 2026. No source reports the phrasing declining.