# Unanchored novelty superlatives 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: novelty-impact-superlative - Category: Lexical (lexical) - Subcategory: superlative - Also known as: groundbreaking, cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, game-changing, game-changer, revolutionize, unprecedented, best-in-class, transformative, innovative - 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/novelty-impact-superlative ## Description Novelty and impact claimed at maximum strength with nothing to check the claim against. Groundbreaking, cutting-edge, state-of-the-art and best-in-class are comparative words used without a comparison, and revolutionize is a verb of scale used without one. Microsoft names the same vocabulary as unsupported claiming in guidance written for human copywriters, which is worth noting because it means the objection predates the tooling. The pattern matches the attributive slot in front of a generic product noun, so a specific claim about a specific instrument survives it. ## Why it reads as machine-written The words carry a promise the sentence never has to keep. They are also what a model reaches for when the retrieved material contains a product name and no measurement. A human writing about a real advance usually cannot resist naming what it beat. ## 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(?:groundbreaking|game-chang(?:ing|er)|best-in-class|state-of-the-art|cutting-edge)\s+(?:new\s+)?(?:solution|platform|technology|approach|tool|feature|innovation|product|suite)\b|\brevolutioniz(?:e|es|ed|ing)\s+the\s+way\b ``` Flags: gi ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > Our groundbreaking new platform will revolutionize the way teams plan their content. Planning is the part everybody puts off, and putting it off has a way of costing more than it saves. What we built takes that seriously and makes the weekly version of it something you do not have to think about. You will notice the difference sooner than you expect to. After, repaired: > The planner now drafts the coming week from the last four weeks of your own posts instead of from an empty prompt. That is the only thing it does differently from the version before it. Note: The repair replaces the scale claim with the mechanism, which the reader can check by using it. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. Institutional communications staff, grant writers and press officers are trained to write this way, and are often reviewed on whether they did. A university announcing a state-of-the-art facility is following a house style that predates any language model by decades. Sales copy in hardware and instrumentation uses best-in-class as a comparative with a real benchmark behind it, and in that case the benchmark is usually one sentence away. The pattern only fires in front of a generic product noun for exactly this reason: cutting-edge microscopy escapes it, because the noun carries the specificity the adjective lacks. A reviewer should look for the referent rather than the adjective, and treat a hit as a question about what the thing is being compared to. ## Model attribution Not attributed to a family. Juzek and Ward find no established cause for lexical overrepresentation at all: architecture and training data are ruled out and the evidence for preference tuning is mixed. ## Platform notes - bing: Microsoft advertising guidance for AI search visibility tells writers to anchor claims to evidence rather than to superlatives. That is advice with no ranking claim attached, and it should not be read as one. ## Sources 1. Juzek and Ward, Why Does ChatGPT Delve So Much? COLING 2025 (arXiv:2412.11385) https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11385 (tier: peer-reviewed; accessed 2026-08-14) 2. Microsoft Advertising, optimizing content for inclusion in AI search answers https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en/blog/post/october-2025/optimizing-your-content-for-inclusion-in-ai-search-answers (tier: vendor; accessed 2026-08-14) 3. vale-ai-tells, 111 machine-checkable rules https://github.com/tbhb/vale-ai-tells (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) 4. is-this-ai-slop word and phrase list https://github.com/didrod205/is-this-ai-slop (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) 5. 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) ## Status history Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page. - 2026-08-15, Active: Named by four independent lists in the harvest and by Microsoft in first-party marketing guidance. Nothing reports it fading, and the low severity reflects how much ordinary promotional copy shares the register. ## 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.