Artificial Intelligence, AI, is all around us and is being used for some incredible things. Many of these things are new and exciting. Some even make our lives easier.
For writers, there are a plethora of AI writing tools (aka content generators) that do all sorts of things—create outlines, brainstorm ideas, summarize a topic, or fix grammar mistakes. These programs can also help you with your writing style. Need your prose to sound more conversational, formal, or witty? There’s an AI program for that.
As more and more AI writing tools are created, so are programs detecting their use. So, if you’re a student using AI to write your papers or essays for you, be aware that teachers and schools can use AI detectors to find out. The same goes for anyone writing scholarly research papers, blogs, professional articles, or other materials—publishers and employers may use AI detectors, too.
So, what do AI detectors look for? These detectors are looking to see if a machine or a human has done the writing. They look for specific characteristics in the text. Is the text predictable and a bit generic? Are the sentences of similar length and the structure more conventional? It could be AI. Or are they dynamic with a richer vocabulary and less predictable sentence structure? Perhaps they have some typos and missing punctuation. Probably human.
Two terms related to detecting AI versus human content are the “burstiness” and “perplexity” of text. According to an article in scribbr.com, burstiness is “a measure of variation in sentence structure and length.” Low burstiness means the content is most likely AI-generated. Scribbr.com describes perplexity as “a measure of how unpredictable text is.” Like burstiness, the lower the perplexity, the more likely the material is AI-generated.
There are dozens of AI detectors on the market. Some, like copyleaks.com and gptzero.me, have you copy and paste your text into a box on their website and they will instantly “detect” the source it’s from. Is it ChatGPT? ChatGPT 4? Bard? Human? Human + AI? They can tell. Others like Winston AI and crossplag.com require you to sign up and create an account before you can try their detection tool.
Concerns have been raised about the accuracy of AI detectors. Some detectors are better than others. According to theblogsmith.com, one of the reasons the accuracy of these detectors varies is because each AI tool is (1) trained on different content datasets, and (2) AI detectors are “based in large part on probabilities.” While no detectors are 100% accurate and each has limitations, as AI content generators get more sophisticated, detectors will as well.
If you choose to use AI-generated content, remember to:
1. Use it wisely—use it in conjunction with your writing, like a writing assistant, to generate ideas or outlines, but not to write your work for you.
2. Double-check the information it generates for accuracy and if it makes sense.
3. Cite the AI tool you used as one of your sources. Any AI material you include needs to be acknowledged. You can’t claim it as your original work if you didn’t write it yourself.
As someone with a lifelong passion for writing, I have conflicting feelings about AI and its impact on what is being written and published. Who will monitor the AI-generated content to ensure it’s being used correctly and that the information it generates is accurate and true?
Have you used any of the AI-generating tools? Which ones? Have you—or anyone you know—used an AI detector for their work? Let us know.
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