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Detector tell · 3 patterns · weight 2

Spatial metaphors for things that are not places

Three rows at weight 2 matching the habit of treating an abstract subject as terrain: a landscape to survey, a world to enter, a path to navigate.

Our detector calls this category “AI metaphor”. The patterns below are read out of functions/api/tools/detect.js when this page is built. A match is a fact about a phrase, not about who wrote the text.

Where this phrase showed up

Did not appear in the licensed samples we checked — no human sample and no AI sample. The rule still matches text that contains its own pattern. The constructed example below is that check.

We are not going to invent an example to fill the gap. What we can show instead is a sentence we wrote ourselves, purely to check that the rule is live.

A constructed example — written by us, not evidence

This sentence was written for this check. It is not from the licensed samples, nobody wrote it as real prose, and it says nothing about how anyone writes. Its only job is to prove the rule still fires, and the generator fails the build if it stops.

“Anyone can navigate the landscape of open-source licensing with help.”

  • /\blandscape of\b/gi → “landscape of”
  • /\bnavigate the\b/gi → “navigate the”

What it means when a person writes this way

Business and journalism have written this way for a century. "The world of finance" predates every model by decades, and a human writer reaching for it is usually reaching for a familiar phrase under deadline rather than producing a machine tell.

The patterns, as the engine holds them

3 of the 70 rows in our phrase table carry this label. They are printed here as they are written, because a paraphrase of a regular expression is a different regular expression.

/\blandscape of\b/gi weight 2

Matches “landscape of” , in any capitalisation .

/\bthe world of\b/gi weight 2

Matches “the world of” , in any capitalisation .

/\bnavigate the\b/gi weight 2

Matches “navigate the” , in any capitalisation .

What a hit does to your score

The phrase model is one of four in our ensemble, and its formula is patternScore = min(98, max(5, 10 + 7 x total weight)). One occurrence of the heaviest row in this category takes that model from 10 to 24 out of 100 — and the pattern model carries 40% of the ensemble when the em-dash signal fires and 55% when it does not.

"landscape of" and "the world of" are unanchored substrings, so they match inside longer phrases — "the changing landscape of retail" counts once.

Check your own text

Our detector is free and shows you which sentences it flagged and why, including this category. Treat the score as a starting point, not proof.

Run the detector If you have been accused Why formal writing gets flagged

Other things the detector looks for