# Stale fact stated as current 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: stale-fact-as-current - Category: Semantic (semantic) - Subcategory: temporality - Also known as: latest version that is not, current as of an unstated date - Status: Active. Currently signals low-effort writing. - 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/stale-fact-as-current ## Description A fact that was true inside some earlier window, given in the present tense with no date on it. The price, the version, the job title, the policy. Nothing in the sentence tells a reader which year it belongs to. ## Why it reads as machine-written Generated text has a window behind it and no clock in front of it, so a state of the world from that window arrives in the present tense. Wikipedia treats undated present-tense claims as a cleanup signal alongside the explicit training-window boilerplate, and its speedy-deletion criterion covers that boilerplate itself. This entry is about the undisclosed case, where nothing announces the staleness. The boundary matters: published boilerplate announcing a training cutoff belongs to the model-register entry that catches the disclaimer text. ## Detection Type: judge (a rubric for a lightweight model judge) Rubric for a lightweight model judge: ```text Task: find present-tense claims about things that change, with no date attached. Step 1. List every claim about a changing state: prices, tiers, limits, version numbers, headcount, leadership, ownership, policy, availability, market position, legal status. Step 2. For each, check whether the text attaches a date, an as-of clause, or a dated source. Step 3. For undated claims, check the current primary: the vendor's own page, the register, the release notes. Step 4. Record: undated and still true; undated and now false; dated. Escape hatches: historical writing in the past tense; documentation versioned by its own URL, where the version is the context; claims about stable facts that do not change; pages carrying a visible last-updated date that covers the claim; archived material presented as archived. Decision. FLAG when a changing-state claim is undated and the current primary disagrees. WEAK when it is undated and could not be checked. PASS when dated. Output: the claim, the current primary's value, and the verdict. This rubric covers undisclosed staleness only. Text that announces its own training cutoff is a different pattern and belongs to that entry. ``` ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > The free tier includes 500 build minutes a month, and the latest release is version 3. Pricing for tools in this category tends to stay put, so these numbers should hold for most readers. If something has moved since, the vendor pages are always the better guide. After, repaired: > As of 15 August 2026 the free tier includes 500 build minutes a month, per the pricing page linked here. Version 5 shipped in June. The version 3 documentation is still online, which is why it tends to come up first in search. Note: The product details in both versions are invented for this specimen. The tell needs its numbers, so the emptiness is carried by the two sentences that reassure the reader the numbers are safe. The repair adds a date, a source and the reason the old fact is still circulating. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. Documentation goes stale between releases without anyone lying, and print publishing has carried this lag since it existed: a book about a product is out of date before it ships and everyone involved knows it. Writers also work from press material prepared weeks earlier, and a piece filed in March about a policy that changed in April was accurate when written. Translations lag their originals. Archived material is supposed to be stale, and stripping the archive banner is the reader's error rather than the writer's. The finding is a maintenance job, and the polite version of it is a note to the author rather than a conclusion about how the text was made. ## Model attribution Follows from a fixed training window, which every model has, and from retrieval that returns an old page. The explicit boilerplate forms in the wild are dominated by older systems, per Wikipedia's dated examples. ## Platform notes - wikipedia: Undated present-tense claims and training-window boilerplate are both listed as cleanup signals, and the boilerplate appears in the speedy-deletion criterion. Editors distinguish the announced case from the silent one, and so does this entry. ## Sources 1. Wikipedia: Signs of AI writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) 2. Wikipedia: Criteria for speedy deletion, G15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) ## Status history Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page. - 2026-08-15, Active: Wikipedia names undated present-tense claims and training-window behaviour among its cleanup signals, and its deletion criterion covers the explicit boilerplate. Two community documents, one behaviour, with the boundary between disclosed and undisclosed staleness stated in the entry. ## 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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