# Vague attribution 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: vague-attribution - Category: Rhetorical and discourse (rhetorical) - Subcategory: weasel - Also known as: weasel wording, experts argue, industry reports suggest, source inflation - 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: 2026-08-17 - Page: https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells/vague-attribution ## Description The authority is asserted and never named. Wikipedia calls this weasel wording and keeps a shortcut for the AI-writing case. The same entry covers source inflation, where one document becomes reports and one analyst becomes analysts, because the text looks identical on the page and the check is identical too: ask who, and see whether the piece can answer. ## Why it reads as machine-written A writer who cannot retrieve a source can still produce the sentence shape that a source would license. The plural does all the work, and it raises the cost of checking past what most readers will pay. This is the highest-severity entry in the category for that reason: the sentence makes a claim about the world and supplies no way to test it. ## 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 \b(?:(?:many|some|most)\s+)?(?:experts|analysts|critics|observers|industry\s+(?:reports|analysts|insiders|watchers))\s+(?:argue|suggest|say|believe|agree|note|claim|warn|point\s+out|have\s+noted)\b ``` Flags: gi ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > Experts argue that the shift will accelerate through the rest of the decade. The pace is harder to call than the direction, and reasonable people disagree about both without much changing as a result. Organisations that prepare early are generally glad they did, though what preparing early consists of is never quite specified. By the time a change of this size is obvious to everyone, whatever advantage there was has usually gone somewhere else. After, repaired: > Two of the four vendors we buy from have said they will drop support for the old format after 2027. The other two have not answered the question twice now. Note: Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen. ### Specimen 2 Before, exhibiting the tell: > Industry reports suggest that daily publishing is now the norm. The pressure to keep up is real and felt hardest by the teams with the smallest budgets, and whether the pace is sustainable gets asked a great deal less often than whether it is being met. After, repaired: > A trade body survey of 312 marketers in June put daily publishing at 18 percent. It sampled agencies only, which is most of the reason the number looks low. Note: Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. Journalists protecting sources write around names as a professional obligation, and a reporter who writes that two people familiar with the deal said something is following a rule, not dodging one. Trade press summarises a field where naming every practitioner would be unreadable. Analyst notes are often under embargo. The check is whether the piece says why the source is unnamed, or names the class precisely enough to be found: a trade body, a named survey, a court filing. Where the text can answer the question who, the attribution is thin rather than empty. Where nothing in the piece could ever answer it, the sentence is decoration in the shape of evidence. ## Model attribution Reported for chat assistants broadly and named by Wikipedia among current signs. No source separates model families, and the shape is old enough that its manual of style entry predates chat products by many years. ## Platform notes - wikipedia: The weasel-wording shortcut is one of the oldest editorial rules on the project, and the AI-writing guide reuses it rather than inventing a new one. - google: The Search spam policy turns on value to users no matter how a page was created. Unattributed claims are part of what makes low-value pages cheap to produce at scale, though no policy text names the construction. ## Sources 1. Wikipedia: Signs of AI writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) 2. tropes.fyi pattern directory https://tropes.fyi/directory (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) 3. vale-ai-tells, 111 machine-checkable rules https://github.com/tbhb/vale-ai-tells (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) ## Status history Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page. - 2026-08-15, Active: Opened as active at high severity. Wikipedia names it with a dedicated shortcut, tropes.fyi lists vague attributions, and vale-ai-tells ships a rule with 61 tokens for the family. The severity reflects the consequence rather than the frequency: the sentence makes a factual claim and removes the means of checking it. ## 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.