# No first-person incident 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: no-first-person-incident - Category: Semantic (semantic) - Subcategory: absence-of-incident - Also known as: authorless advice, perspective-free post, experience-shaped prose with no experience in it, no first-hand specifics - Status: Active. Currently signals low-effort writing. - Severity: medium - Evidence grade: corroborated (named independently by multiple credible secondary sources) - Languages: en - Added: 2026-08-14 - Updated: 2026-08-15 - Page: https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells/no-first-person-incident ## Description The piece gives advice and reports no occasion on which the author did anything. First person can still be present as opinion or as address to the reader. What is missing is an event with a time and an outcome. Nothing in the text could only have been written by the person whose name is on it. ## Why it reads as machine-written A model has no history to draw on, so it cannot supply an occasion. It supplies the posture instead. This is the pattern platforms describe when they say content lacks perspective. It also resists editing, because adding an incident requires having had one. ## Detection Type: judge (a rubric for a lightweight model judge) Rubric for a lightweight model judge: ```text Task: decide whether the text contains a first-person incident. An incident needs three parts, all present in the same passage: (1) an actor the author was, marked by I or we; (2) an event located in time, either by date, season, sequence marker or a named occasion; (3) an outcome or consequence that followed. Count as an incident: 'We moved the pricing page behind a login in March and demo requests halved.' Do NOT count as an incident: opinion ('I believe pricing pages should be simple'); a habit with no occasion ('I always start with the headline'); a hypothetical ('imagine you are launching'); an intention ('we plan to test this'); address to the reader ('you have probably noticed'). Also count, separately: attributed second-hand incidents, meaning a named person, a cited study or a quoted source that supplies the event instead of the author. Decision. Flag only if ALL hold: (a) the text is 150 words or longer; (b) it gives advice or asserts what works; (c) first-person incident count is 0; (d) attributed second-hand incident count is 0. Do not flag: encyclopedic or reference writing, which forbids first person by convention; third-person news reporting; product or API documentation; recipe, spec or legal text; anything whose byline is not the writer, including ghostwritten and translated work. Output: incident count, second-hand incident count, the strongest candidate sentence quoted, and FLAG or PASS. ``` ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > Hiring your first employee is one of the most important decisions a founder will make. Take your time, define the role clearly, and trust your instincts. Culture fit matters more than credentials, and the right person will grow with the company as it scales. After, repaired: > We hired our first employee in February and wrote the job description in an afternoon. That was the mistake. She spent her first six weeks doing support, because support was what we actually needed, and nothing in the ad had said so. She left in August. The second time, we logged what the two of us did for a week and posted the log as the description. Note: Same advice underneath. The difference is that the second version can be wrong about something. ### Specimen 2 Before, exhibiting the tell: > Many teams underestimate how much technical debt slows them down. It is worth auditing your codebase regularly and prioritising the areas that cause the most friction for developers day to day. After, repaired: > We spent a Friday counting where our build time went and found 40 percent of it in a test suite for a feature we had removed in the spring. Deleting it took an hour. I had been complaining about build times for four months without ever measuring them, which is the part worth copying. Note: The incident carries a time, an action and an outcome. Opinion alone would not. Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. Whole genres forbid first person, and their writers are the people this entry can hurt. Encyclopedia style bans it outright. Most newspaper reporting outside the column pages does too. Technical documentation is written from nowhere by convention, and so are specs, recipes and legal drafting. Ghostwriters produce advice out of someone else's experience for a living, which means the byline is not the writer and the absence is contractual. Translators carry incidents that were never theirs. Junior writers with a real job and no war stories yet also fail this test honestly. Apply it to personal-brand posts under a named byline. Do not apply it anywhere else. ## Model attribution Not attributable to a family. The absence follows from the model having no autobiography, which is true of every assistant surveyed. No published work measures first-person incident density per vendor. ## Platform notes - youtube: The channel monetization policy names AI-generated content from generic templates that gives the impression of mass production without adding the creator's original, authentic insights or perspective. The last clause is the operative one. - linkedin: Generic AI-generated content lacking a clear perspective is one of the three targets in LinkedIn's May 2026 policy. LinkedIn also states plainly that AI and slop are not the same thing, so the trigger is the missing perspective rather than the tool. - instagram: Meta's 2026 original-creator policy counts a remix or overlay as original only when the creator adds fresh information, analysis or substantial improvements. Narrating someone else's material without adding value is treated as unoriginal. Meta's policy text does not mention AI at all. ## Sources 1. YouTube channel monetization policies (inauthentic content; page states last updated 2025-07-15) https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1311392 (tier: primary-doc; accessed 2026-08-14) 2. Keeping conversations real on LinkedIn (Laura Lorenzetti, VP and Executive Editor, LinkedIn Global Editorial, 2026-05-20) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/keeping-conversations-real-linkedin-laura-lorenzetti-9821e (tier: primary-doc; accessed 2026-08-14) 3. Rewarding Original Creators on Facebook (Meta Newsroom, 2026-03-13) https://about.fb.com/news/2026/03/rewarding-original-creators-on-facebook/ (tier: primary-doc; accessed 2026-08-14) 4. Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing (section: Signs of human writing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) 5. Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines (dated 11 September 2025) https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf (tier: primary-doc; accessed 2026-08-14) 6. Google Search Central: Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide (tier: primary-doc; accessed 2026-08-14) ## Status history Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page. - 2026-08-14, Active: Three platform policies name the absence of the creator's own insight as the enforcement trigger. Scope is deliberately narrow: it applies to first-person advice under a named byline, and the false-positive note lists the genres where absence of first person is the house rule. ## 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.