# Quality-assertion adjectives 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: quality-assertion-adjective - Category: Lexical (lexical) - Subcategory: product-adjectives - Also known as: seamless, seamlessly, robust, comprehensive, versatile, scalable, holistic - Status: Contested. Credible people dispute that this signals anything at all. - 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/quality-assertion-adjective ## Description Adjectives that assert quality in a slot where the sentence could have demonstrated it. Seamless, robust, comprehensive, versatile, scalable and holistic are the standard product-page vocabulary, and they are also the standard vocabulary of a page written by someone who has not used the product. Contested, because half of these words are terms of art elsewhere. The pattern matches the fixed marketing collocations only, which lets the technical senses through. ## Why it reads as machine-written These adjectives are unfalsifiable in the slot they occupy. A seamless integration cannot be checked and a two-click connection can, so the version with the number in it is the version somebody tested. ## 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 \bseamless(?:ly)?\s+(?:integrat(?:e|es|ed|ion)|experience|workflow)\b|\ba\s+(?:robust|comprehensive|holistic|scalable)\s+(?:solution|platform|approach|framework|strategy|suite)\b ``` Flags: gi ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > A robust platform with seamless integration and a comprehensive set of publishing features. Everything is built to work the way you already work, so there is nothing new to learn and nothing at all to configure. After, repaired: > It connects to LinkedIn, X, Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon. Instagram needs a business account. There is no TikTok connector and no date for one. Note: The repair is a list of what exists, including the gap. The gap is the part that makes it credible. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. Robust is a precise term in statistics, control theory and structural engineering, where a robust estimator has a defined breakdown point and a robust design has a stated tolerance. Scalable has a specific meaning in distributed systems. Holistic is standard in nursing, education and several therapeutic traditions. Product and user-experience writing owns seamless outright, and a designer describing a handoff as seamless usually means they removed a step and can tell you which one. Comprehensive is required in insurance and in the title of a great many reference works. The pattern therefore fires only on the marketing collocations, and a reviewer should check whether the sentence names a mechanism anywhere near the adjective. ## Model attribution No vendor attribution. These adjectives predate the current models by decades in product copy, and their presence in the excess-word set is a statement about frequency change, not origin. ## Platform notes - google: Quality rating turns on effort, originality and added value. A page of quality adjectives with no demonstrated mechanism is the shape those criteria are written against, whatever produced it. ## Sources 1. 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) 2. LexA-Index, CC0 per-language overuse dataset https://github.com/fsu-nlp/lexa-index (tier: primary-doc; 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. Wikipedia: Signs of AI writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) ## Status history Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page. - 2026-08-15, Contested: Contested. Named across four sources including the Kobak excess-word set and the LexA data, and simultaneously the native vocabulary of product marketing, statistics and systems engineering. The word alone signals genre rather than authorship, which is why the pattern is restricted to the marketing collocations. ## 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.