Ever since ChatGPT’s launch, there has been a concern for everyone as people have started using it for generating large amounts of content fast. And given how natural the text that is generated is, you can have a hard time trying to detect whether it’s AI-generated text or human-written one.

And because it has become a huge part of our daily life, isn’t it obvious that we need to learn how to detect it? No? Just me? Okay.

With this easy-to-grasp content creator such as ChatGPT, you’ll likely enter more and more synthetic content on the web. You probably have read a full article and never knew it was AI-generated. If you’re a quiz guy, you might have also stumbled upon an auto-generated BuzzFeed quiz too!

Isn’t it time to know how to detect AI-generated text?

 

How can I detect AI-generated text?

Before we understand how to detect AI-generated text, it’s important to know just what AI-generated text is.

In simple terms, AI-generated text is any form of digital content that is created or generated by AI models. You can read more about what AI-generated content is here.

Now that we have this crystal clear, the question arises – how to detect it? Surely it’s not as easy as spotting grammar issues.

There are three best ways to detect AI-generated text:

More often than not, the content structure of AI-generated text is fairly easy to spot once you get to deal with AI-generated text on a daily basis. The sentences that are produced by an AI model are usually out of the structure and sometimes are not even related to one another. AI-generated text often lacks the fluency and coherence characteristic of human writing.

Another way to detect AI-generated text is by paying attention to the overall tone and ‘voice’ of the text. AI-generated content is very inconsistent when it comes to the tone as it struggles to maintain a writing style throughout the article. Looking for abrupt shifts in tone and inconsistencies will most likely help you detect AI-generated text faster.

Or, you can also take the easy way and use an AI detector. AI detectors are designed and trained to spot AI-generated text in a matter of seconds by checking for patterns and word structuring and flagging content that is more likely to be AI-generated.

Crossplag's AI Detector in action
Crossplag’s AI Detector in action

 

What makes a text AI generated?

As stated above, a text is considered AI-generated as long as it comes from an AI model. Simple, right? 

AI models are trained on a lot (a lot!) of written information. These models use a very complex algorithm that analyzes that very written information and learns how to generate new sentences that mimic human writing.

What differentiates AI-generated text and human-written ones is, well, the way they are made. AI-generated text rises from a prompt that a human sends to the AI model, to which the AI model responds to the prompt – very fast – with a rather large answer. That’s what makes it different from human ones – it’s really fast. But, worth mentioning is that the AI-generated text can be very biased based on the information it’s fed on.

On the other hand, humans have emotions and attachments that can only come from human writing. Also, humans can come up with new things – hey, we came up with ChatGPT. AI models don’t have the tendency to innovate something. Basically, they just recycle pre-written fully-human content and kind of reassemble the words without changing the context.

Not to say that humans don’t have errors in writing, because we’ve witnessed multiple articles that don’t really resonate with what’s best for a specific topic. We also have a lot of errors that we need to work on that AI doesn’t – such as grammar. AI is fluent in grammar and I’ve never seen it make a grammar mistake. Humans do. A lot.

But hey, I’m a human so yay us. (Not biased at all).

Can Google really detect AI content?

The short answer is yes – Google can detect AI content.

There have been numerous use cases where there is a very low possibility of ranking a website using only AI-generated text.

And Steven Rich probably gave the best answer there is to it:

The answer is simple.

AI content will never become an Experienced Expert on any topic. This is critical as you will read about Google’s E-E-A-T search ranking standards below.

While there is no denying that ChatGPT is awesome and very fast, it doesn’t guarantee you quick success. Well, nothing guarantees you quick success but I feel like if I go down this road I’ll digress.

Anyway, what Steven said is absolutely the epitome of why AI-generated text will never work.  Also, as Content Hacker claims “Google can detect AI content“.

Additionally, Google clearly states in its Spam policies that “…automatically generated content is spam

Google's Spammy automatically-generated content screenshot
Google’s Spammy automatically-generated content screenshot

That is to say that if you want to rank a website, AI-generated text is not the way to go.

 

Is there any tool to detect AI-generated text?

Crossplag’s AI detector is an advanced tool specifically designed to help detect AI-generated text. Considered one of the most sophisticated tools available for this purpose, it remains the best solution for AI detection.

Initially, you can perform a couple of free scans without the need to log in. However, after a certain point, you will be required to sign up where you gain access to an unlimited free number of AI checks.

The tool usage is pretty straightforward. You simply copy and paste the text you want to analyze into the provided text box. After you submit the text, the tool evaluates it and generates an overall score indicating the probability that the text was generated by AI.

In its latest update, Crossplag has improved its features by offering more precise information about the analyzed text, allowing you to check a larger number of words at once, and reducing the occurrence of false positives.