# Generic scene-setting opener 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: scene-setting-opener - Category: Rhetorical and discourse (rhetorical) - Subcategory: opener - Also known as: In today's fast-paced world, In the ever-evolving landscape of, In today's digital age - Status: Burned. So widely publicised that human writers now trip it too, or vendors removed it. Signal value has collapsed. Kept because retired signal is information. - Severity: medium - Evidence grade: community-observed (named by practitioners, no formal measurement exists) - Languages: en - Added: 2026-08-15 - Updated: 2026-08-17 - Page: https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells/scene-setting-opener ## Description The zoomed-out first line. It describes an era instead of a subject, and it fits any topic at all. vale-ai-tells covers it inside an opening-cliches rule with 92 tokens. Burned: a decade of content marketing taught the opener deliberately, and by 2026 it is quoted as a joke more often than it is written in earnest. This entry owns the full landscape phrase in its aka list, so no other entry claims a bare landscape token. ## Why it reads as machine-written The opener is topic-independent, which is what makes it cheap to generate and useless to read. A first line that survives being moved to another article was never about this one. Search-trained writers were taught to open this way on purpose, so the shape carries a human history at least as long as the machine one. ## 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 \bin\s+(?:today['’]s\s+(?:fast[-\s]paced|digital|modern|ever[-\s]changing|hyper[-\s]connected|competitive)\s+(?:world|age|era|landscape|environment|marketplace)|the\s+ever[-\s](?:evolving|changing|shifting)\s+(?:landscape|world|realm|field)\s+of)\b ``` Flags: gi ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > In today's fast-paced world, staying visible online has never been more challenging. Audiences have more to choose from and less time to spend on any of it, which puts genuine pressure on anyone trying to reach them, and the brands still standing in a few years will be the brands that made peace with it early. After, repaired: > Reach on our page fell by half between March and June while posting frequency stayed flat. The drop tracked a change in how the feed treats outbound links. Note: Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen. ### Specimen 2 Before, exhibiting the tell: > In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, brands must adapt or fade. After, repaired: > Two of our three paid channels stopped clearing cost in the second quarter. We moved that budget into the newsletter, which is the only channel with a list we own. Note: Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. A decade of human content marketing wrote this opener first, and search-trained writers were taught it explicitly as a way to establish topical context in the first line. Textbooks, press releases and student essays all use the era-opener as a taught convention, and second-language writers pick it up from the same instruction. Because the phrase is famous, it also appears in parody. A reviewer should ignore the phrase entirely and look at the second sentence: if the piece has still not named its subject by then, the problem is the missing subject rather than the opener. ## Model attribution Unattributed. Two of the three sources are evasion prompts listing phrases to avoid, marked as such and usable only as inverted evidence of what models produced when they were written. The practitioner rule set is the load-bearing citation here and names no vendor. ## Platform notes - google: The Search quality rater guidelines rate scaled, unoriginal, low-effort content at the bottom regardless of how it was made. An opener that transfers between topics is one of the things that makes such pages cheap to produce. ## Sources 1. vale-ai-tells, 111 machine-checkable rules https://github.com/tbhb/vale-ai-tells (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) 2. keskinonur gist, words and phrases to avoid for ChatGPT https://gist.github.com/keskinonur/4b2d9b7f3311332cf60c91cb45efb362 (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14; inverted evidence, cited for what it catalogues rather than what it advocates) 3. anti-slop-writing system prompt and pattern list https://github.com/adenaufal/anti-slop-writing (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14; inverted evidence, cited for what it catalogues rather than what it advocates) ## Status history Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page. - 2026-08-15, Burned: Opened as burned. Content marketers taught this opener explicitly for a decade before chat products existed, and it is now the single most quoted example in popular guides, so human writers trip it constantly. The rule stays listed and stops firing, since a retired signal is information about the discourse. ## 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.