I've seen Douglas Adams use almost exactly this in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. A professor (IIRC) is talking to a former student. Quoting from memory

"Did you ever actually finish any papers?"

"No. But the reasons why not were always absolutely fascinating."

So, yeah, for me personally it's not an AI tell. I've seen it in the wild before AI.

In that quote, Adams doesn't repeat himself, before making an assertion. He realises the audience has more of a context window than three words.

The same is not true, of the token generation that... Mostly Claude models... Have taken to.

Yeah, but that doesn't sound like AI at all. Not even close.

LLMs glom onto pre-existing tropes, idioms, and verbal constructs.