# Imagine-a-world opener 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: imagine-a-world-opener - Category: Rhetorical and discourse (rhetorical) - Subcategory: opener - Also known as: Imagine a world where, Picture this - Status: Burned. So widely publicised that human writers now trip it too, or vendors removed it. Signal value has collapsed. Kept because retired signal is information. - Severity: low - Evidence grade: community-observed (named by practitioners, no formal measurement exists) - Languages: en - Added: 2026-08-15 - Updated: 2026-08-17 - Page: https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells/imagine-a-world-opener ## Description The hypothetical-scenario opener. tropes.fyi lists it and vale-ai-tells ships an opening-cliches rule with 92 tokens covering it and its neighbours. Burned rather than active: the phrase has been quoted in so many guides and jokes that it now reads as parody, and the writers who used it in earnest have mostly stopped. ## Why it reads as machine-written A hypothetical costs nothing to invent and delays the first checkable fact by a paragraph. Publicity is what burned it. The same mechanism has been measured elsewhere: Geng and Trotta recorded a publicised marker collapsing in academic writing soon after it was named, while unpublicised markers kept rising. A directory like this one accelerates that decay for everything it publishes, which is why status is a field here rather than a footnote. ## 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 (?:^|[.!?]["'’)\]]?\s+|\n)(?:Imagine\s+a\s+world\s+(?:where|in\s+which)|Picture\s+this[:.,]|Imagine\s+for\s+a\s+moment) ``` Flags: gm ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > Imagine a world where your content writes itself. The calendar fills, the drafts appear, and the rest comes down to deciding what is worth keeping and what was never worth writing. After, repaired: > Our drafts come out of the same prompt every Monday and two of us rewrite them by Wednesday. The rewrite is the job. ### Specimen 2 Before, exhibiting the tell: > Picture this: it is Monday morning and your inbox is already full. After, repaired: > On 3 February the shared inbox held 214 unread client messages at nine in the morning, because the weekend autoresponder had failed silently on the Friday. Note: Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. Conference speakers and advertising copywriters invented the move and it still works in a room, where the speaker is present and the audience has agreed to be led somewhere. Fiction, speculative journalism and policy scenario writing all open on a hypothetical as a matter of form. Because the phrase is now famous, plenty of human writers use it with a wink. That combination is why the status is burned: a hit says something about the sentence and close to nothing about who wrote it, and the rule is de-armed for that reason rather than deleted. ## Model attribution Unattributed. One of the three sources is an evasion prompt listing phrases to avoid, which is inverted evidence of what models produced when it was written, and it is marked as such. The other two are practitioner lists that name no vendor. ## Sources 1. tropes.fyi pattern directory https://tropes.fyi/directory (tier: community; 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. keskinonur gist, words and phrases to avoid for ChatGPT https://gist.github.com/keskinonur/4b2d9b7f3311332cf60c91cb45efb362 (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14; inverted evidence, cited for what it catalogues rather than what it advocates) ## Status history Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page. - 2026-08-15, 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. ## 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.