# Promotional register in the wrong genre 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: promotional-register-misplacement - Category: Semantic (semantic) - Subcategory: register - Also known as: WP:AIPUFFERY, unanchored claims, brochure warmth in a report, genre glitch - Status: Active. Currently signals low-effort writing. - Severity: medium - Evidence grade: corroborated (named independently by multiple credible secondary sources) - Languages: en - Added: 2026-08-15 - Updated: 2026-08-15 - Page: https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells/promotional-register-misplacement ## Description Advertising register arrives in prose whose genre forbids it. An incident report reassures. An encyclopedia entry invites you to visit. A methods section describes its own approach as exciting. ## Why it reads as machine-written Marketing prose is heavily represented in training text and its register is the default gravity, so a model asked for neutral writing drifts back toward it. A researcher writing in 2026 named the phenomenon a genre glitch, where a phrase belonging to one genre surfaces in another. Wikipedia reports the same drift even when editors prompt for encyclopedic style, and notes an edit summary claiming to have removed promotional tone while introducing it. Microsoft's own guidance to writers aiming at AI search answers tells them to avoid claims with nothing behind them, which is the same advice from the other direction. ## Detection Type: judge (a rubric for a lightweight model judge) Rubric for a lightweight model judge: ```text Task: decide whether promotional register has arrived in a genre that forbids it. Step 1. Name the genre from its own conventions: incident report, encyclopedia entry, methods section, minutes, court filing, obituary, syllabus, changelog, marketing page, sales email. Step 2. Scan for promotional moves. Count each occurrence: (a) superlatives about the subject with no source or measurement; (b) warmth adjectives applied to a product, place or organisation; (c) commitment and reassurance language where the genre asks for facts; (d) invitations to buy, visit, join or explore; (e) second-person address in a genre that does not use it. Step 3. Note whether the promotional sentences carry any checkable content at all. Escape hatches: the genre is marketing, where all of this is correct; promotional wording quoted from a party inside a news piece or a filing; a press release reproduced and labelled as one; nonprofit and campaign writing, which is persuasive by design; cultures and languages whose formal register is warmer than English business prose. Decision. FLAG when two or more promotional moves appear in a genre whose conventions forbid them. WEAK on one. PASS in marketing genres. Output: the genre, the moves counted with quotes, and the verdict. ``` ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > Our platform, known for its reliable performance, experienced a brief service interruption on Tuesday. We remain committed to delivering an outstanding experience for every one of our customers. After, repaired: > The API returned server errors for 43 minutes on Tuesday, starting at 09:12 UTC. A migration dropped an index and every read on the billing table fell back to a full scan. We have added a check that fails the deploy when an expected index is missing. The post-mortem is linked. Note: Figures and timings in this repair are invented for the specimen. The genre asks what happened, and the first version answers a different question. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. Marketing copy is supposed to read like marketing copy, and judging a landing page by the conventions of an incident report is a category error. Writers new to a genre import the register they already know, which is why a first post-mortem from someone out of a sales team reads like a press release with no tool involved. Nonprofit and campaign writing is persuasive by design and answerable to a different standard. Business registers also differ by language and culture, and prose translated from a warmer one arrives sounding promotional in English when it was neutral at home. The question is always what the genre demands, never whether the sentence is enthusiastic. ## Model attribution Wikipedia notes that older models produced more openly positive text and that later ones avoid obvious superlatives while keeping the warmth, citing a 2025 study of language complexity and sentiment. That is a direction of travel rather than a per-vendor measurement. ## Platform notes - wikipedia: Filed under WP:AIPUFFERY, with a words-to-watch list and dated article examples. The page states plainly that not all promotional writing is machine-generated. - bing: Microsoft advertising guidance for content aimed at AI search answers tells writers to avoid claims with nothing supporting them. It is advice, published with no data and no ranking claim attached. ## Sources 1. Wikipedia: Signs of AI writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) 2. Walker Rettberg, genre glitches and unexpected promotional phrases https://jilltxt.net/genre-glitches-and-unexpected-promotional-phrases-as-a-sign-of-ai-writing/ (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) 3. 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) ## Status history Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page. - 2026-08-15, Active: Wikipedia documents the drift with dated examples, a named researcher describes the same effect as a genre glitch, and a vendor guidance page names unanchored claims from the writing side. Three independent descriptions of one behaviour. ## 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.