Curly quotes in plain-text registers
- Id
- curly-quotes-in-plain-text
- Status
- Contested
- Severity
- low
- Detection
- deterministic
- Evidence grade
- corroborated
- Languages
- en
- Added
- 2026-08-15
- Updated
- 2026-08-17
Credible people dispute that this signals anything at all.
What it is
A text carries the full typographic set, curly quotation marks together with curly apostrophes, in a register whose composer produces straight ones. Wikipedia records the habit for two model families and states that two others typically do not produce it.
Why it reads as machine-made
Chat surfaces render typographic characters, and text copied out of one keeps those characters when it lands in a field that would never have made them. The artifact locates the composer. It is heavily confounded by word processors and phone keyboards, which is why this entry ships as contested and why the pattern asks for the full set rather than a single mark.
Specimens
We asked our customers what “good support” actually means to them, and the answers weren’t surprising so much as familiar. People want to feel heard, and they want to feel it quickly. Every company says it already does this. The ones that genuinely do rarely need to say so.
We asked forty customers what "good support" meant. Twenty-three said the same thing: talking to the same person twice. We changed the routing rules in week two so a reopened ticket goes back to whoever closed it, and reopen volume fell by half in August.
Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen. The tell is the full typographic set in a plain-text field, not the emptiness. The specimen was hollowed because the earlier version carried a real research finding, which made the entry read as a complaint about apostrophes in decent writing.
How it is detected
- Pattern
- [\u201C\u201D][^\n]{0,200}[\u2018\u2019]|[\u2018\u2019][^\n]{0,200}[\u201C\u201D]
- Flags
- g
- Scope
- document
Who writes this way legitimately
Microsoft Word, the macOS and iOS default keyboards and grammar tools such as LanguageTool convert straight marks to curly ones without being asked, so anyone drafting in them produces the artifact by default. Directional marks are correct under Chicago style and standard in typeset books and major newspapers, and citation tools copy them straight out of page titles. Some fonts render a curly apostrophe as a straight one, so the distinction can be invisible to the very reader making the judgement. Wikipedia's own caution is the one to keep: curly marks alone establish nothing, and two widely used model families do not produce them.
Model attribution
Wikipedia attributes the habit to ChatGPT and DeepSeek specifically and states that Gemini and Claude models typically do not use curly quotes. slop-lint reports roughly nine curly marks per thousand words for GPT and Grok output and none for Claude, which is one repository's measurement and should be read as one.
Platform notes
- The composer stores whatever characters were pasted, so a draft written on a phone and a draft pasted out of a chat window are indistinguishable on this signal alone.
- x
- Plain-text bodies, no conversion. The marks survive, which makes the surface easy to observe and useless for a verdict about any single account.
Status history
| Date | Status | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-15 | 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. |
Sources
- 01Wikipedia: Signs of AI writingcommunityaccessed 2026-08-14
- 02slop-lint, social-reply-register moldscommunityaccessed 2026-08-14
CC BY 4.0 / The AI Tells Index, feedsquad.com/ai-tells