# Unfilled placeholders

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: unfilled-placeholder
- Category: Formatting (formatting)
- Subcategory: template-leak
- Also known as: [Your Name], INSERT_SOURCE_URL, access-date=2025-XX-XX
- Status: Active. Currently signals low-effort writing.
- Severity: high
- 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/unfilled-placeholder

## Description

A template slot published with the slot still in it. The bracket text names the field nobody filled.

## Why it reads as machine-written

Wikipedia records model output inserting placeholder dates into citation fields, most often the access date, and placeholder strings into source and publisher fields. Sign-offs arrive with the name bracket intact. This is not a claim about writing quality at all. It records that the draft was published without a read-through, which is the failure criterion G15 is written around.

## Detection

Type: deterministic (a regular expression, run as written)

Scope: document

ECMAScript regular expression. The build validator compiles it and tests it against this entry's own specimens.

```regex
(?:\[(?:Your|Insert|Client|Company|Product|Brand)[ _][A-Za-z ]{2,20}\]|\bINSERT_[A-Z][A-Z0-9_]{2,30}\b|\bSOURCE_(?:PUBLISHER|URL|TITLE)\b|\b\d{4}-(?:XX|xx)-(?:XX|xx)\b|\b\d{4}-\d{2}-(?:XX|xx)\b)
```

Flags: g

## Examples

Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts.

### Specimen 1

Before, exhibiting the tell:

> Thanks again for the call last week. I have attached the deck and the pricing sheet.
>
> Best regards,
> [Your Name]

After, repaired:

> Thanks again for Tuesday's call. The deck is attached, and the pricing sheet now carries the 40-seat tier we talked about, on page 3.
>
> Best regards,
> Anni

Note: Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen.

### Specimen 2

Before, exhibiting the tell:

> Source: INSERT_SOURCE_URL_30, publisher SOURCE_PUBLISHER, accessed 2025-XX-XX.

After, repaired:

> Source: the Finnish Tax Administration guidance on VAT for digital services, published 12 March 2025 and read on 14 August 2026.

## False positives

Who legitimately writes this way.

Mail merge and content management templates produce the identical artifact with no model involved: a broken merge field, a snippet pasted out of a boilerplate library, a citation manager that could not resolve a date. Writers working from a house template leave the brackets in when a deadline moves. Every one of those cases deserves the same flag for the same reason, so treat a hit as a publishing-process failure rather than a claim about who drafted the sentence. Writing about templates quotes these strings on purpose, and quoted examples have to be excluded before a hit counts.

## Model attribution

Wikipedia records the citation-field forms in model output, naming the access-date parameter as the most common slot and the source and publisher fields as rarer ones. No vendor documents the behaviour, and no measurement by model family exists in anything this project read.

## Platform notes

- wikipedia: Criterion G15 covers pages published with no human review, and an unresolved citation field is the cheapest evidence that no review happened.

## Sources

1. Wikipedia: Criteria for speedy deletion, G15
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion
   (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14)
2. 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: Active and high severity. Wikipedia keeps dated examples of citations published with an unresolved access date and with source and publisher slots left as literal strings, and criterion G15 treats the same class of artifact as grounds for speedy deletion. The pattern is anchored to bracketed slot names, screaming-case tokens and unresolved date fields, so ordinary lowercase identifiers do not register. Regex verified on 2026-08-15 against both specimens and three negatives.

## 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.

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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.