What Is An AI Detector?

AI Detection Tools

Mon Aug 12 2024

What Is An AI Detector?

ChatGPT and other generative AI have made a landmark contribution to the world of content creation. You can create text and image of any kind at this point. It’s easy to tell apart visual AI-generated content from pictures created by humans, however AI-generated text presents more difficulty trying to distinguish it from human writing.If the only evidence you have is the text, there is no way to fully prove whether that piece of text was AI-written. The best you can do is run it through an AI Detector that can give you a confident assessment.AI Content Detectors know AI writing better than anything. They know how ChatGPT thinks and writes. It writes in simple, precise language that lacks any human writing style or flow.The tools are imperfect but without them, technology has pushed humanity to the brink of losing both media and academic integrity to artificial intelligence.

Table of Contents

  • What Is An AI Content Detector?
  • What Does An AI Detectors Do?
  • What Is Undetectable AI?
  • Can AI Detectors Be Wrong?
  • What Is The Best AI Detection Software Available?
  • Conclusion
  • FAQ

What Is An AI Content Detector?

As the name suggests, AI Detectors detect AI writing in any piece of text. If a student asks ChatGPT to write an essay for them, that essay will be full of choices that an AI detector determines comes from a human or artificial intelligence.An AI Detector will usually give you a score, telling you how much of the text is human writing and how much is AI writing. You rarely get a simple yes or no answer from a detector for many reasons. Firstly, because they measure down to the sentence level, so the score is a culmination of analyses. Second, because AI Detectors are prone to false positives.They’re imperfect technology, just as AI writing tools are imperfect. Ironically though, the way AI Detectors work is by measuring perfection.

How Does An AI Detector Do?

Most AI detectors make two essential measurements: perplexity and burstiness. Human writing is rather perplexing. We often use random word choice, sentence length, and sentence structure that isn't always the simplest and most precise way to communicate something.That precision and simplicity in which an AI writing tool optimizes for is the “perfection” that AI Detectors are taught to look for in their machine learning. Just as the machine learning algorithms of AI writing tools like ChatGPT involve language models that teach them how to perfectly describe something, not humanly describe something.If you want to learn more about perplexity and burtiness, this Forbes article breaks down the two metrics beautifully.Once you understand what AI content detection tools look for, you can make a piece of text undetectable. This is why the emergence of AI Detection tools has also led to the emergence of undetectable AI.

What Is Undetectable AI?

Undetectable AI services will take AI generated text from ChatGPT and run it through an AI Humanizer, rewriting it to feel like human-written content. Then, if the Undetectable AI service is any good, the text should be able to bypass a detector and so that it assesses a higher presence of human-written text than AI-written text.Undetectable AI use natural language processing models to rewrite AI-generated text to sound human by manipulating the text’s burstiness and perplexity.

Is Using AI Writing Tools Plagiarism?

One might ask, is the use of machine-generated text plagiarism? To which the answer is still a bit cloudy.Traditionally, no. Using artificial intelligence for content generation does not fall under the formal dictionary “plagiarism”. However, because it’s still a threat to academic integrity, with the use of AI chatbots in student work being so pervasive, many institutions have coined it as “AI Plagiarism”.AI writers only generate original content so if you were to pass it through an older plagiarism checker, it would come out clean.As people try to police this phenomenon, academia is slowly seeing that employing AI writing detectors creates a climate of suspicion.There’s nothing worse than when a professor doesn’t know which AI content detectors work and runs student work through some free AI detector and gets a false positive for that student’s own human writing.

Can AI Detectors Be Wrong?

Even the most commonly used AI content detector, Turnitin acknowledges they are an imperfect software with a 4% false positive rate at the sentence-level. This means, with the use of AI being so prevalent among students, countless false positive results are detected throughout a given year.Sadly, a Stanford Study has proven AI detector tools show bias against non-native English speakers and international students that use simpler language in their essays similarly to how AI might.Even though every AI Detector shows some degree of this problem, many are so popular, they’ve become integrated into the submission process.

What Is The Best AI Detection Software Available?

The largest two companies in the space are Turnitin, who’s software is integrated into Blackboard and Canvas, the two major student submission portals, and Originality.AI. Other such companies that are less popular but often used include GPTZero, ZeroGPT, Copyleaks, Content at Scale, Quillbot, and many more.These competitors offer the same service, but many seem to have less functionality detecting AI writing. Some seem to simply spit out a score without truly analyzing it. Additionally, these AI detector tools usually run a pretty penny if you want to subscribe to their service. And if you’re a student or content creator that wants to use Turnitin, you can’t easily gain access.That’s why the only service in this market without any problematic ethics is AI Detect. For free, you can use AI Detect to run a piece of text without a word limit and learn whether it’ll be detected as AI writing or human writing. AI Detect is for everyone, content creators using AI and the moderators reviewing their work. To give you an example of AI Detect's capabilities, here’s how undetectable text fares against Turnitin, Originality, and AI Detect:
Turnitin scored this undetectable text as less than 20% AI and thus decided it couldn't give a percentage because the likelyhood of a false positive would be too high. Now here's Originality.AI reviewing the same text:
Originality.AI performed better than Turnitin with a score of 86% likely AI writing. Now finally, AI Detect's free version:
AI Detect's free detection tool outperformed both Originality.AI and Turnitin here with a score of 1% human, meaning it knew 99% of the text was AI writing.

Conclusion

AI Detectors are a necessary tool in modern academia and media. With the prevalence of AI writing tools, there needs to be a system of checks and balances that rewards people that do the hard work before those that simply take the shortcuts. The shortcuts are the reward themselves for those that use AI writing tools.AI Detectors are important for both moderators reviewing content and creators that don’t shy from the use of AI. As of now, AI detection technology and its implementation might be flawed, however with free versions of AI content detection tools like AI Detect available, these systems can be democratized and destigmatized.So, see for yourself how your text fares against an AI Detector. Check out AI Detect's pricing page here and see if you want to take a test drive or go full speed ahead.

FAQ

Who Uses Generative AI?

Anyone in a field that requires content from content writers, to social media creators, to academics using AI for student work, the use of AI for writing is everywhere.

Who Uses AI Detection Tools?

Moderators in the worlds of media and academia use AI content detection tools like Turnitin and Originality.ai to review text submissions. Content creators that use AI writing tools also use AI Detectors to determine if the text they’re planning on using is closer to human-written text or AI-written text.

What Is The Best Value For An AI Detector?

Certainly not Turnitin. If you want a free version of their service, the closest you can get to the power of their AI model is AI Detect. You can view our pricing below and read about How To Get Turnitin For Free on our blog.

What Kind of Content Do People Use AI Writing Tools For?

Student work, social media, emails, and SEO blog content are often generated using AI writing tools. Many AI writers are trained to have the search engine research baked into their content generation.

How Reliable Are AI Writing Detectors?

AI Detectors are reliable to point you in the right direction but not to flat out tell you if a piece of text is AI writing or not. While some are more reliable than others, even the most commonly used service, Turnitin has a 4% false positive rate at the sentence level. That’s why universities like MIT have published works simply titled “ AI Detectors Don’t Work. Here’s What To Do Instead” to show people why they are abandoning their use.

Written By

Rob Shepyer

Rob Shepyer

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