# Volume signature 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: volume-signature - Category: Platform-specific (platform) - Subcategory: aggregate - Also known as: step-change in publishing rate, output implausible for the staff named - 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/volume-signature ## Description A step change in publishing rate against a stable baseline. Three organisations found their problem this way before anyone read a sentence. Clarkesworld closed submissions in February 2023 after machine-written entries jumped from roughly 25 a month to more than 500. NewsGuard's tracker counts sites that churn out dozens of articles a day and had logged 3,749 of them as of 23 June 2026. curl ended its bug bounty at the end of January 2026 under a flood of well-formatted reports describing nothing real. Seven reports arrived in the programme's final week and none of them described a vulnerability. ## Why it reads as machine-written Volume is the property that rewriting cannot remove. A person writing carefully has a ceiling and generation does not, so the aggregate moves long before the prose does. This is the strongest evidence in the whole dataset that behaviour beats style, and it is also why the platforms with the most data score accounts rather than sentences. ## Detection Type: statistical (a measured metric against a threshold with a stated basis) Metric: publishing-rate-step-change-vs-baseline Threshold: 3 (fires when above) Threshold basis: > Nobody has published a cutoff for how fast a publisher may accelerate, so this is a FeedSquad review trigger rather than a measured line. Three times the trailing 12-week median is set where an ordinary campaign push or a new hire will usually stay below it. The events that produced this entry cleared it by far more: 25 submissions a month to over 500 at Clarkesworld, and sites publishing dozens of articles a day in the NewsGuard tracker. Treat a hit as a prompt to ask who wrote the extra output, and read it next to the masthead. ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > Our newsroom publishes 40 in-depth analyses every week, covering markets and policy with rigour you can trust. Our team of expert writers works around the clock so you never miss a development. After, repaired: > We publish two analyses a week. Both are written by Sara Lindqvist and me, we name our sources inside the piece, and corrections go at the top of the article with the date they were made. Note: The repair states an output a masthead of two can actually produce. Names and figures in this repair are invented for the specimen. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. Publications scale up honestly all the time, through hiring, syndication deals, acquisitions and wire feeds. A seasonal desk triples its output every December on purpose. The check is whether the masthead grew with the output and whether the new material carries reporting that costs something: named sources, original photography, corrections. A rate change with a staffing change behind it is a business event, and this entry says nothing about it. ## Model attribution No family attribution. None of the three organisations named a model, and two of them said explicitly that they were counting submissions rather than judging text. ## Sources 1. NPR, Clarkesworld closes submissions after a flood of machine-written stories https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence (tier: press; accessed 2026-08-14) 2. NewsGuard AI tracking center and UAIN framework https://www.newsguardtech.com/special-reports/ai-tracking-center/ (tier: press; accessed 2026-08-14) 3. The Register, curl shutters bug bounty program to stop AI slop https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/01/21/curl_shutters_bug_bounty_program_to_stop_ai_slop/5063039 (tier: press; accessed 2026-08-14) ## Status history Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page. - 2026-08-15, Active: Three independent organisations in three fields detected their slop influx by rate rather than by reading, and each published what they had counted. That is the strongest corroboration available for any entry here, and it holds regardless of how the text was produced. ## 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.