sloptells

AI-written text has tells. They change as models change — “delve” died in 2024, and the list below is what's measurably alive today. We measure them: generate text from current and older models on prompts matched to pre-AI human writing, find what models overuse, check every candidate against acclaimed human prose so we don't flag good writers, and date everything.

This is a style linter, not an AI detector — these patterns read as AI whoever wrote them. If you write with an agent, point it at the api or llms.txt and let it dodge the list while drafting.

check your text

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active — strongly overrepresented in current model output — worth avoiding

saturated — everyone knows, models (or their users) still do it

fading — being trained away — declining across model generations

stale — widely believed, no longer true — we publish the correction

retired — historical — the tells of model generations past

a move38 experiment · methodology · api · llms.txt · tells.md