# Unverifiable specific geography 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: unverifiable-specific-geography - Category: Semantic (semantic) - Subcategory: provenance - Also known as: towns that do not exist, invented venue datelines - 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/unverifiable-specific-geography ## Description Named small towns, venues and local officials that do not exist. The names are well formed for the region and the population figures are plausible. Nothing in a gazetteer answers to them. ## Why it reads as machine-written Place names have strong regional morphology, so producing a convincing one is easy and producing a real one is not the same task. In the 2025 freelance fabrication the invented settlements were among the things that finally surfaced the fraud, alongside a payment process the writer could not complete. Two commercial detection tools had already cleared the copy. That ordering is the single strongest argument in this dataset against leaning on tools: the fabricated geography was checkable by anyone with a map, and the software was not. ## Detection Type: judge (a rubric for a lightweight model judge) Rubric for a lightweight model judge: ```text Task: check that every named place and local office exists. Step 1. List every settlement, venue, building, road, institution and public office named in the text, with the events attributed to each. Step 2. Look each up in a gazetteer, a national or municipal register, a company register, a map service and the relevant official directory. Record found, not found, or unreachable. Step 3. Cross-check the attributes: population figures against census or municipal statistics, an office title against the body that would hold it, a venue against the address given. Escape hatches: composite or anonymised locations, which are legitimate in protected-source journalism and must be declared in the piece rather than inferred by a reader; historical names now changed or absorbed; transliteration and diacritic variants; hamlets and features that mapping services omit; informal local names for real places; fiction. Decision. FLAG when a named settlement or public office returns nothing in any register and the text attributes events to it. Return UNKNOWN when the registers are unreachable. Output: each place, its register result, and the verdict. Do not use commercial detection tools as part of this check. In the documented case two of them cleared the fabricated copy. ``` ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > In Kellenmoor, a former mill town of about 900 in the eastern hills, the parish clerk has run the same October ceremony every year since 1974. After, repaired: > The ceremony has run every October since 1974 in a village of about 900 people. The parish clerk is named in the piece, the register entry giving the first year is photographed in the archive, and the population comes from the municipality's 2024 statistics page, which is linked. A reader who doubts any of it can open the sources. Note: Kellenmoor is invented for this specimen. The repair does not swap in a better-sounding place name. It adds the route by which a reader checks the one that is there. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. Composite and anonymised locations are standard practice where naming a place would identify a source or a patient, and a piece that uses one should say so rather than leave a reader to guess. Registers are also incomplete and inconsistent: hamlets vanish from map services, municipalities merge and rename, transliteration produces four spellings of one town, and small venues appear under a licensee's name rather than their own. Historical writing is full of places that no longer exist under any name. The verdict for an unreachable register is unknown, and a reviewer who cannot read the national register for that country should say so instead of scoring it. ## Model attribution No vendor can be named. The documented case never established which tool produced the copy, and the fabricated geography is a property of writing about places without looking at any. ## Sources 1. Press Gazette, the Margaux Blanchard fabrication https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/digital-journalism/margaux-blanchard-wired-ai-editors-journalist/ (tier: press; accessed 2026-08-14) 2. Press Gazette, Wired and Business Insider remove AI-written freelance articles https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/digital-journalism/wired-and-business-insider-remove-ai-written-freelance-articles/ (tier: press; accessed 2026-08-14) ## Status history Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page. - 2026-08-15, Active: Six outlets retracted work under one fabricated byline in 2025, and the trade coverage records nonexistent towns and payment friction as what exposed it after two detection tools had cleared the text. The check is a lookup, which makes it one of the few reliable ones here. ## 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.