# Signposted conclusion 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: signposted-conclusion - Category: Structural and syntactic (structural) - Subcategory: conclusion-shape - Also known as: the announced ending, wrap-up heading, restated opening - 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/signposted-conclusion ## Description A closing section that announces its own arrival and then hands back the opening claim unchanged. tropes.fyi lists it, vale-ai-tells checks the heading forms it arrives under, and Wikipedia's signs-of-AI-writing page treats the announced wrap-up as a marker. This entry judges what the closing section contains. The phrases that announce an ending belong to the canned-conclusion-phrase entry, and the specimen below deliberately carries none of them. ## Why it reads as machine-written An ending has to be paid for, with a consequence, a decision or an admission. The announced version pays with restatement. The test is whether a reader who skips the last section loses anything, and in a low-effort draft the answer is no, because the section was generated from the piece rather than from any further thinking. ## Detection Type: judge (a rubric for a lightweight model judge) Rubric for a lightweight model judge: ```text Read the last section, or the last two paragraphs if the piece has no sections. List every noun, figure, date, name and commitment in it. Check each against the opening two paragraphs. Return the count of items in the closing that do not appear in the opening; zero means the ending restates. Escape hatches: abstracts, executive summaries, legal briefs and scientific discussion sections, where a restatement move is required by the genre and judged on how well it is done, and any closing that names a next action, a date or a person. Report the count and quote the one item you judged new, or say there was none. ``` ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > The review process needed changing, and everything above explains why it needed changing. The team should take a look at it. Change is worth the effort when a process is holding people back. After, repaired: > From 1 September two named reviewers sign off every pull request. If the median review time is still over a day at the end of October, we go back to the rota and I write up why this failed. Note: The first version returns the opening claim. The second names a date, an owner, a number and the condition under which the decision gets reversed. Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. The five-paragraph essay teaches this shape explicitly, so student work and anything written by someone recently taught that way will produce it under time pressure. Abstracts, executive summaries, legal briefs and scientific discussion sections require a restatement move by genre, and a good one is judged on how economically it does the job. The check is whether the ending carries a decision, a date or a number the opening did not; genre-required restatement usually does, and padding does not. ## Model attribution Undocumented by vendor. The shape is what a model produces when asked for a complete piece, because a complete piece in most training material has a conclusion. ## Platform notes - wikipedia: The signs-of-AI-writing page treats the announced wrap-up as a marker and pairs it with the observation that encyclopedic articles rarely need a conclusion section at all. ## 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) 3. 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, Active: Carried by three independent taxonomies, including the largest maintained public one, with no decay note on any of them. The heading forms remain shipped as checkable rules. ## 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.