# One-point dilution 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: one-point-dilution - Category: Structural and syntactic (structural) - Subcategory: repetition - Also known as: content duplication, the same claim restated - Status: Active. Currently signals low-effort writing. - Severity: high - Evidence grade: community-observed (named by practitioners, no formal measurement exists) - Languages: en - Added: 2026-08-15 - Updated: 2026-08-15 - Page: https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells/one-point-dilution ## Description One claim, restated across several paragraphs in different clothes. tropes.fyi lists content duplication and one-point dilution as two patterns; they fire on the same text, so they are one entry here. vale-ai-tells carries a document-level duplication check. Nobody has measured the pattern, and the evidence grade says so. ## Why it reads as machine-written Length is the easiest thing to add to a draft and the hardest thing to add honestly. A generator asked for 800 words on a 200-word idea will produce 800 words. Severity is high because the reader pays four times for one thing, and because the padding hides how thin the underlying material was. ## Detection Type: judge (a rubric for a lightweight model judge) Rubric for a lightweight model judge: ```text List the distinct claims in the passage, counting a claim as distinct only when it introduces a noun, a figure or an actor that the others do not. Divide the word count by the number of distinct claims. Then reorder the paragraphs and reread: check whether any pronoun loses its referent or any comparison loses its first term. Escape hatch: speech transcripts and teaching texts, where restatement is the medium doing its job, and safety or compliance material written so a reader can enter at any point. Return the claim count, the words per claim, and whether reordering broke anything. ``` ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > Remote work needs clear written communication. When teams are distributed, writing things down is how information travels. Without written records, distributed teams lose track of what was decided. Teams that do not write things down end up having the same conversation twice. After, repaired: > Our decisions used to live in calls, so anyone who missed the call missed the decision. In February we started writing a four-line note after every meeting: what we decided, who owns it, when it lands, what we rejected. The rejected line turned out to matter most, because the same two ideas kept coming back every six weeks. Note: One claim in four coats became one claim with a mechanism, a date and a surprise. Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. Speech transcripts repeat by design, because a listener cannot reread and oral rhetoric was built on restatement long before any of this. Safety and compliance material repeats deliberately so a reader entering at any point still gets the whole instruction. Beginner instructional writing does the same, and so does anything written to be read aloud. The check is the medium and the ordering: if the paragraphs can be shuffled with no reference breaking anywhere, the piece is one point wearing four coats. ## Model attribution Undocumented by vendor. The pattern follows the word count in the prompt rather than the model, which is why it survives every change of model family. ## Platform notes - google: Search spam policy covers scaled content abuse no matter how the content was created, in Google own wording. The policy is about value to the reader, not about tooling. ## 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) ## Status history Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page. - 2026-08-15, Active: Carried by two community rule sets as separate patterns that fire on the same text, and consistent with first-party search guidance treating low-value repetition as a quality problem. No measurement exists, so the grade stays at community-observed while severity reflects what the pattern costs a reader. ## 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). 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