# Curly quotes in plain-text registers Part of [The AI Tells Index](https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells). A tell signals low effort. It does not identify an author. Skilled writers produce every shape listed here, some of them daily, and automated detectors misread those writers for it at rates measured above 60 percent on non-native English prose. Nothing in this index proves that a machine wrote anything. Read an entry as one piece of evidence to weigh against the false-positive notes printed beside it. ## Facts - Id: curly-quotes-in-plain-text - Category: Formatting (formatting) - Subcategory: typography - Also known as: smart quotes, WP:AICURLY, typographic apostrophes - Status: Contested. Credible people dispute that this signals anything at all. - Severity: low - Evidence grade: corroborated (named independently by multiple credible secondary sources) - Languages: en - Added: 2026-08-15 - Updated: 2026-08-17 - Page: https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells/curly-quotes-in-plain-text ## Description 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-written 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. ## Detection Type: deterministic (a regular expression, run as written) Scope: document ECMAScript regular expression. The build validator compiles it and tests it against this entry's own specimens. ```regex [\u201C\u201D][^\n]{0,200}[\u2018\u2019]|[\u2018\u2019][^\n]{0,200}[\u201C\u201D] ``` Flags: g ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > 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. After, repaired: > 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. Note: 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. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. 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 - linkedin: 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. ## Sources 1. Wikipedia: Signs of AI writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) 2. slop-lint, social-reply-register molds https://github.com/eric-sabe/slop-lint (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) ## Status history Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page. - 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. ## License CC BY 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Attribution: The AI Tells Index, feedsquad.com/ai-tells Reuse the data, including commercially. Keep the attribution line. --- Dataset version 1.0.0. Schema version 1. Part of [FeedSquad](https://feedsquad.com). Built by [Herman Foundry](https://hermanfoundry.com) from Levi, Finnish Lapland.