AI-generated content is everywhere. It’s hard to find content today without an AI-generated part or the whole.
Considering how AI-generated text quality has evolved over the last year, does it matter anymore whether the content is written by artificial intelligence or humans?
Well, the answer depends on your content needs.
Whatever the case, if it bothers you if what you’re reading is from an AI, a human, or a mix of both, there are foolproof ways to detect AI content without an iota of doubt.
In this article, I walk you through the steps to identify AI writing, both through manual review and with AI detection tools.
What is AI-generated content?
AI-generated content is any text (Part or whole) produced by an artificial intelligence technology. Content generated by AI can be images, text, AI video, or audio modified or created by AI algorithms.
These artificial intelligence systems can analyze trillions of datasets, learn from them, and use that information to generate text and visual content.
AI can perform and complete these steps before you say “Jack.”
The speed at which AI generates content is breakneck, and you can get 10X content outputs within the same time limit.
Text prompts are all it takes to have an AI write your content. You must instruct or guide the AI to understand your content needs and topic. Describe what you want, and the AI will generate comprehensive content.
Several AI writing software are available today, such as GPT, Jasper, WriteSonic, CopyAI, etc. Some AIs perform several writing tasks, while others suit a specific marketing.
An excellent example of a specialized AI tool is Leonardo AI. Leonardo AI is incredibly good at creating visual content across different genres and art styles.
While you can use ChatGPT to create visual content, too, it excels in text generation.
Understanding AI writing content
Understanding how AI machine learning works, especially for text generation, might awaken your curiosity about whether the text or content was generated by an AI or a human writer.
An AI writing assistant predicts the next word(s). It’s more about predicting the relationships between words and their meanings across different contexts.
Because AI models have learned from billions of examples, textbooks, website content, social media, academic papers, etc., they can predict the most likely word to appear next in a sentence based on the context.
When you enter your text prompt into an AI writing tool, what it does is understand your instruction. It considers all the words it has seen/learned in similar contexts and generates the most probable text/words based on its analysis.
It continually generates an entire sentence, paragraph, piece of content, or even a textbook using this pattern.
So, technically, AI content is not unique or original thoughts. It’s just a regurgitation or recomposition of what’s already in the public domain.
Because of this, content-driving businesses must ensure their content meets user expectations, is free of fluff, hallucinations, incorrect stats, is unique, and is plagiarism-free.
Also, knowing how your freelancer produces content is crucial. You don’t want to pay someone to use an AI-assisted writing tool.
You should test your content with an AI content analysis tool to check originality and factual accuracy.
How to Detect AI Writing Without Tools
As I said earlier, there are several ways to check if something is written by an AI, including manual review by a human editor or using an AI detection tool.
Depending on your level of expertise and industry knowledge, you can spot AI text, sentences, or paragraphs within a piece of content by reading through it. Looking for some signals and patterns accustomed to AI-generated content.
Although AI language models have improved in content quality over the years, the following are characteristics of most content written by artificial intelligence.
Lack Emotion
The quality of AI writing tools varies greatly, as some AI writing assistants are trained to understand and invoke human emotion in their responses.
Still, AI content is far from genuinely understanding human emotions, their triggers, and how to use emotions to convey various messages in a piece of content.
For example, human writers can use storytelling to engage the audience, connect on a deeper level, and make the reader feel part of the community.
AI content struggles to do this, even when your prompt instructs it to use storytelling and other human emotions in its response.
No one can tell your story better than you; this is why humans might always surpass AI in using the power of storytelling and emotions to write better content that converts.
So, look for content that uses humor, storytelling, surprise, empathy, and other known human emotions to convey its message. This can be the BIG difference between AI and human-written content.
Reference without Citations.
Although some AI, such as Google Gemini and ChatSonic, have improved in this regard, many AI writing assistants still can’t cite their sources.
This is one of the biggest cons of AI models in the early stages of development.
AI language models are trained on billions of pieces of information scraped from the internet, making it impossible for AI to pinpoint where it got its data.
Unless you explicitly instruct the AI to reference a particular page or website, most artificial intelligence writing software can’t link to a page or reference its data source.
Now, if you read through an article and notice several facts or statistics without a link to their source, that can signal AI-generated content.
Human writers with years of industry experience know the importance of citing data sources, as this can improve content quality and help users find more relevant information.
Incorrect, Outdated, or Inconsistent Factual
AI models are trained on massive datasets, and sometimes, their knowledge gaps or cutoff dates are limited by events, seasons, or time.
AI will generate incomplete or outdated information if it’s not regularly updated with newer or the latest information.
For example, the ChatGPT-3.5 AI model cutoff date is January 2022; this means the AI does not know events past January 2022.
If you ask it to write about topics that require information beyond this date, ChatGPT might include outdated or incorrect statistics or information.
However, you can only spot this difference in AI content vs human writing content if you know your industry or the topic. If you don’t know the correct information, you may unknowingly accept what the AI produces.
For example, I once asked Bing AI what the price of the WP Rocket Single license plan is, and the AI replied with $49.
This was several months after the price had increased to $59. But because I knew the new price, I could tell Bing AI hadn’t gotten that right.
If you’re using AI content for your business, you should always review it for factual accuracy and statistics.
There is a good tool you can use to check the factual accuracy of any AI content. Just paste your content, and the AI will run a background analysis to discover if something is false.
Repetitive Text or Words.
Another way to review AI content from original human writing is to check for repetitive text or search queries.
This usually happens when SEOs instruct the AI to include specific keywords or phrases in the content. In its generation, the AI repeatedly includes text or similar keywords to meet the SEO prompt guidelines.
Here is a good example.
The text below is only 620 words long, but ChatGPT repeatedly mentioned “AI-generated content” 13 times. A good human writer with industry knowledge and SEO copywriting skills won’t do this unless he also writes like a robot.
You could argue the prompt lacks direction and further guidelines, but this is how a typical AI writer generates responses. And for the sake of this write-up, I need to stick to a basic AI prompt.
Generic Information
One of AI-generated text’s most significant drawbacks is that generic content lacks critical thinking and original thought. Most automatically-generated content lacks the personal opinion of the writer.
When you read computer-generated content, you will notice that many points or tips, especially in tutorials, are generic information or summaries of existing information.
AI content cannot infuse personal experience or opinion because, let’s face it, AI can’t have experience. AI is trained only to perform specific tasks, making it incapable of thinking outside its training dataset.
However, unless you’re an experienced writer or a subject expert, many people won’t notice that what they read is nothing but some generic thought spit out by an AI.
You need deep industry knowledge and experience to differentiate original takes on the subject from generic information.
If you’re at this stage in your career, you don’t need AI detection tools to tell if a human writer or an AI generates a piece of content.
Lack of consistency
Inconsistencies in tone, logic, and writing style are another red flag for identifying AI-generated content.
Many AI language models struggle to maintain a consistent writing style and tone of voice throughout content, especially long-form content.
In an industry topic requiring complex logic or reasoning, you’ll often see AI moving from one logical reasoning to another, contradicting what it said earlier.
This is because, as weird or complex as it may sound, AI cannot recall or know previous information as humans do. What AI does is store and access past interactions or conversations.
Also, AI is trained to reconstruct existing text to form words in a familiar context. Humans can consider the situation and context and apply sense and critical thinking consistent with past, existing, or future occurrences.
How to Detect AI Content Using Tools
Now that you’ve learned how to manually check AI writing, let’s check how to detect AI content with tools.
These tools will help you analyze your content, scan it, check for possible AI or human content signals, and present a detailed report and additional analyses.
However, you should know that these are tools; their ability to detect AI or human content depends on their developers. Some AI text checkers work very well and have low false-positive rates, while others should not be taken too seriously.
Originalty.ai
With this in mind, the AI content detection tool we will use for our study is Originality.ai. Originality.ai is one of the most popular and effective content detection platforms.
I have been using this tool for quite some time, and it’s been a great addition to my toolbox. I would recommend you try Originalty.ai for several reasons.
First, Originality.ai works with many AI language models, including Claude 2, ChatGPT, GPT-4 Turbo, Grok, Gemini, and Mixtral. It can detect content written by any of these large language machine-learning algorithms with high accuracy, up to 98%.
Here is a text generated by Google Gemini, detected by Originality.ai.
As you can see, Originality.ai confirms the text is 100% AI. The probability that the content is AI-generated is 100%.
If you’re a freelancer, content agency, or creator, this is the best tool to learn whether your content writers use AI or write the article themselves.
In addition to AI content detection, Originality.ai lets you check content for factual accuracy, plagiarism, and readability. This will help you reduce costs, as you can analyze several aspects of your content in one platform.
Another helpful feature is that you can scan content from the article URL.
So, even if you can’t access the content, you can enter its URL into Originalty.ai, which will run the scan. Plus, you can have multiple users in your account, which is a good feature for agencies and freelancers.
Conclusion
AI has changed how content is created across every industry, field of learning, and academic space, and virtually every aspect of human life has been redefined by AI technology.
AI has unprecedentedly transformed the digital marketing landscape, from social media to blog posts and advertising copy.
Detecting AI content can help you learn to use the information more effectively. You can access and use the content for its intended purpose without spreading false or misleading information.
As AI technology improves, it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish original human content from AI-generated writing. But with the help of AI detection tools like Originality.ai, Copyleaks, and GPTzero, you can confidently check content for originality.
