# Emphatic adverbs 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: emphatic-adverb-tic - Category: Lexical (lexical) - Subcategory: vendor-suppressed - Also known as: truly, genuinely, straightforward, really, simply put - Status: Active. Currently signals low-effort writing. - Severity: medium - Evidence grade: primary-doc (platform policy, vendor documentation, or a model card) - Languages: en - Added: 2026-08-15 - Updated: 2026-08-17 - Page: https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells/emphatic-adverb-tic ## Description Intensifying adverbs that add emphasis and no content. What lifts this entry above list folklore is first-party documentation: Anthropic publishes its product system prompts with dates, and the Claude Opus 5 prompt of 2026-07-24 instructs the model to avoid saying genuinely, honestly and straightforward, with the 4.8 prompt of 2026-05-28 naming genuinely, honestly and actually. A vendor writing a suppression instruction is documenting the tendency it is suppressing, which is dated evidence about a default pull rather than about what the shipped product emits. ## Why it reads as machine-written The adverb performs sincerity in a sentence that has not earned any. It is also load-bearing for nothing: remove it and the claim is unchanged, which is the test. ## 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 \b(?:truly|genuinely)\s+(?:remarkable|exciting|special|impressive|unique|humbled|grateful)\b|\bsimply\s+put\s*[,:] ``` Flags: gi ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > This is truly remarkable work. Simply put: nobody else is doing it, and the care behind it is genuinely rare in a category this crowded. After, repaired: > We tried five other tools in July and none of them let you approve a week of posts from one screen. If we missed one, tell us and we will correct this page. Note: The repair replaces the intensifier with the count, the month, and an invitation to be shown wrong. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. Conversational essayists, newsletter writers and anyone putting speech on the page use these adverbs naturally, because spoken English is full of them and a transcript that removes them stops sounding like a person. Straightforward is plain English and is often the most accurate word available, which is why this pattern does not match it at all despite the vendor instruction naming it. Sincerity markers also do real work in apologies and in bad news, where a flat register reads as indifference. The pattern requires an intensifier plus a specific evaluative adjective for that reason. A reviewer should apply the deletion test: if the sentence means exactly the same thing without the adverb, the adverb was decoration, and if it does not, leave it alone. ## Model attribution Anthropic names genuinely, honestly and actually in the Claude Opus 4.8 system prompt dated 2026-05-28, and genuinely, honestly and straightforward in the Claude Opus 5 prompt dated 2026-07-24. That is evidence about a default pull the vendor is correcting, and it says nothing about what any other family does. ## Sources 1. Anthropic dated system prompts, release notes https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/release-notes/system-prompts (tier: vendor; 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. 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, 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. ## 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.