How to Detect AI-Generated Text: Navigating the Age of AI Content
Generative AI tools have transformed how people create content. It is easy to find blogs and newsletters fully written using AI. Artificial intelligence tools are also becoming smarter by the day.
Sometimes, it can be hard to distinguish between AI-generated text and human-written articles. This opens up the door to ethical issues, especially in journalism and education. Knowing how to detect AI-generated text can help maintain authenticity and trust.
In this guide, we break down strategies, tools, and insights to help you spot AI content and navigate this tech wave with confidence.
Why Being Able to Detect AI-Generated Text Is Important
AI-generated text is everywhere, from LinkedIn to YouTube videos created using scripts written by AI. While AI can be a useful tool for research and curating ideas, it also has its fair share of risks.
§ Misinformation
Misinformation is a massive challenge in today’s information world. AI tools can be biased, leading to fabricated news laced with false facts.
§ Plagiarism
There is a growing concern about how students use AI tools. Some students can misuse AI tools to write their essays or do their assignments.
§ Evaluating Credibility
Think of it this way. You have read an article on your favorite news site only to find out a couple of days later that it was written using AI. This destroys media credibility, making readers lose trust in real journalism.
Key Features of AI-Generated Text
§ Robotic
How can you detect AI-generated text in an era when AI tools are becoming smarter by the day? Well, one thing AI tools cannot do is mimic the human touch when writing articles or text.
AI text is robotic and can be mundane, especially in long-format articles or posts. Humans use creative phrasing to make their writing fun and engaging. AI detectors like Walter Writes AI can catch AI-generated text because it is highly predictable.
§ Monotonous
Human-written text is uneven, and there is peace in the chaos. If you read through a paper written by students without using AI assistance, you will notice variations in sentence length and structure.
The mix of short sentences with long ones is something AI tools cannot replicate. Most AI-generated articles often feel monotonously uniform.
§ Generic Language
AI tools struggle with creativity when generating long-format articles requiring specificity. You will notice an overuse of terms like “however,” “in addition,” or “with regards to.”
AI writers often repeat the same point, just wording it differently to hit the word count. This is one of the things that makes it easy to detect AI-generated text. In fact, this is where tools like Humanizer AI are making a difference, helping students refine AI-generated drafts so they sound more natural, authentic, and human. But if the student adds personal input, and uses real opinions or examples from their own life the essay becomes much better. In this case, AI becomes a tool, not a total replacement of an author.
Challenges in Detecting AI-Generated Text
Developers working behind AI tools are refining the training data to make AI smarter and more human-like. This has made and will make it hard to detect AI-generated text.
There is also the challenge faced by non-native speakers, where their content can be flagged as AI generated even though it is 100% human written.
The last issue is with how some users can tweak their AI-written articles to bypass AI detectors. The users can add typos and vary the sentence and paragraph length to make their articles look human written.