Tech article
Opus 5.5 loves to tell you ‘this matters’ (and other AI writing tells)
Publisher description: Opus 5.5’s biggest tell is the word “dependable,” which pops up 23 times more often than in human samples.
TechCrunch | Oct 1, 2026 | Russell Brandom
Automated excerpt
While early tells like em-dashes and “delve” are long gone, researchers say there are still plenty of telltale habits that AI models fall back on when writing prose. A new study from the marketing firm Graphite looked at the writing habits of frontier models, sussing out each model’s favorite words and phrases. In Graphite’s samples, Opus 5. 5 used the punctuation mark 99% less often than Opus 5.
Selected automatically from source text; not independently written or fact-checked. Read the original for full context.