# Depth-claim adjectives 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: depth-claim-adjective - Category: Lexical (lexical) - Subcategory: depth-claims - Also known as: profound, nuanced, multifaceted, deeply rooted - Status: Active. Currently signals low-effort writing. - 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/depth-claim-adjective ## Description Adjectives that claim analytical depth for analysis that never arrives. A nuanced understanding, a profound impact and a multifaceted challenge each promise a complication and then decline to name one. The pattern matches the fixed noun phrases rather than the adjectives, because profound has an ordinary sense and multifaceted is often the finding itself. ## Why it reads as machine-written The claim of depth is the cheapest available substitute for depth. It is also the move a text makes when it has summarised two positions and cannot adjudicate between them. ## Detection Type: deterministic (a regular expression, run as written) Scope: sentence ECMAScript regular expression. The build validator compiles it and tests it against this entry's own specimens. ```regex \ba\s+(?:more\s+)?nuanced\s+(?:understanding|view|perspective|take|approach)\b|\ba\s+profound\s+(?:impact|effect|shift|change)\b|\bmultifaceted\s+(?:approach|challenge|issue|problem)\b|\bdeeply\s+rooted\s+in\b ``` Flags: gi ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > The report offers a nuanced understanding of a multifaceted problem deeply rooted in team culture. The findings resist easy summary, which is part of what makes them worth sitting with. Culture is not fixed in a quarter, and treating it as a project rather than a habit is a mistake organisations make more than once before anything about it registers. After, repaired: > Two teams missed the same deadline. One had nobody assigned to the final step and the other had three people assigned to it. Naming one owner fixed the first case in a day. The second case is still open. Note: The repair supplies the complication that the word nuanced was promising. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. Philosophy, theology and obituary writing use profound in its ordinary sense, and a profound effect is standard clinical phrasing for an effect of large magnitude. Multifaceted is frequently the finding rather than a decoration: much social science exists to establish that a problem has several dimensions, and the paper that establishes it has earned the word. Deeply rooted is literal in botany and forestry. Nuance is the object of study in linguistics and in law. The pattern targets the fixed phrases for that reason, and a reviewer should ask what the second facet is, because a text that can name it is doing the work the adjective claims. ## Model attribution No family attribution documented. The adjectives appear in the Kobak set as corpus-level frequency changes. ## Sources 1. Kobak et al., Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications, Science Advances 11(27) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt3813 (tier: peer-reviewed; accessed 2026-08-14) 2. vale-ai-tells, 111 machine-checkable rules https://github.com/tbhb/vale-ai-tells (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) 3. tellsign word and phrase lists https://github.com/ctkrug/tellsign (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) 4. Wikipedia: Signs of AI writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) ## Status history Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page. - 2026-08-15, 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. ## 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.