How to Detect AI Generated Content: Top 5 AI Content Detectors

In an era dominated by digital information and artificial intelligence (AI), the proliferation of AI-generated content has become both a powerful tool and a potential challenge. As AI technology advances, it has become increasingly sophisticated in creating text that can mimic human-generated content with remarkable accuracy.

And scene! Thank you ChatGPT for this intro sentence.

About 76% of marketers already using AI use it for basic content creation and benefit from their increase in performance. As more people use natural language generation (NLG) tools in writing, some want to know how to detect AI-generated content to ensure it isn’t exploited in unethical ways.

What is AI-generated content?

Anything you write with the help of machine learning based on human inputs is AI-generated content. You can use AI to create any form of copy, from long-form content and marketing materials to social media posts and product descriptions.

Although ChatGPT dominates the headlines these days, people have adopted several other NLP tools to help produce and improve content without realizing it. Remember Grammarly and Siri? Applying AI in the content creation process is nothing new — ChatGPT is just the newest tool.

Advantages of writing content with AI

There are many good reasons why digital marketers and business owners are looking more into using AI tools for content creation. These are some of the advantages of writing copy with AI:

Saves time: Writers who use AI spend 30% less time writing a 2,000-word blog post than those who don’t.
Saves money: Businesses rely on AI to address skills shortages and be more productive, reducing overall labor costs.
Generates ideas: Marketers and strategists can overcome writer’s block and easily generate creative content ideas and strategies.
Increases accuracy: AI can process huge amounts of data in a short time with minimal errors.

Disadvantages of writing content with AI

Despite the several advantages, there are numerous disadvantages to relying solely on AI-generated content. These include:

Factual errors: Some AI models can produce statements that appear to be true but are actually false (called AI hallucinations).
Outdated information: An AI program might produce an article on current events without incorporating new information that emerged.
Predictability: Once you’ve tried a few AI models, you’ll start noticing predictable patterns, so much so that you may recognize when others used them.
Voiceless: AI content may be grammatically correct and easy to read, but can sound bland and impersonal, like no target audience was considered.

In a worst-case scenario, you could face a situation like the New York Times considering legal action against OpenAI for copyright violations.

5 tools to help detect AI-generated content

Any person, organization or educational institution may be interested in ensuring the authenticity and reliability of the information they read. It can be difficult to pinpoint AI-generated text if you’re not familiar with the tools.

However, there are a few things you can look for to help you detect AI-generated content.

Patterns or repetition of words and phrases.
Unnatural structure and format.
Conflicting or out-of-date information and discrepancies.
Lack of originality, depth or personal touch.
The author’s background and expertise.
Lack of sourcing or hyperlinks.
No creativity or opinions.

There’s even a game called Real or Fake Text? to test your AI-detection skills.

Even so, the best and fastest way to detect AI-written content is to use an AI detection tool. These tools use a variety of methods to detect AI-generated text, including analyzing the tone and style of content, checking for errors and looking for patterns in paragraphs. The more predictable the pattern, the more likely the content was created using AI.

Here are five well-known AI content detectors:

Can AI content really be detected?

With AI becoming more advanced, it may be difficult to detect AI-generated text in some cases, even with the help of the above methods. To test this theory, we copied the starting paragraph of this article (generated by ChatGPT) into these four free AI content detectors — GPTZero, Content at Scale, Copyleaks and Writer.

Although all four programs detected the paragraph as not written by a human being, the results differed regarding how much it’s likely to be AI-generated:

GPTZero: 54% probability this text was entirely written by AI (no highlighted text).

Content at Scale: 100% likely to be AI-generated (highlighted text).

Copyleaks: 98.3% probability for AI (highlighted text).

Writer: 56% probability for AI (no highlighted text).

The inconsistency of these results shows why people might question AI detector tools’ reliability. They can hit the mark with a few lines and completely miss it with the next few. Plus, if you simply paraphrase the parts that are highlighted as problematic, you can outwit all these programs. If this is the outcome of ChatGPT-created text, then what does it mean for human-generated content?

AI content detectors are not foolproof. GPTZero calculated that the US Constitution had a 96.21% probability of being AI-generated. We’re pretty sure James Madison didn’t copy any computer-generated content onto five pages of parchment.

So, how can you detect AI writing? If you’re concerned about whether someone wrote their article using a machine rather than their own thoughts and research, use a combination of tools and your best judgment.

Can Google detect AI-generated content?

Google makes it clear that plagiarized and spam content will affect your rankings on search engine result pages (SERPs). There is nothing currently indicating that Google is penalizing AI-generated content. That being said, content created primarily for search engine rankings, no matter how it’s done, is against their guidelines.

In short, although AI content may not get you into trouble with search engines, your chances of ranking will be lower compared to original content, especially if your AI-generated text uses content from other sources.

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AI-generated content may be faster, cheaper and more efficient, but it’s not the best option for everyone. If you write something predictable, unimaginative and boring, your content will stand out as written by AI (or inferior writing). On the other hand, if your content is exciting and presented uniquely, your target audience will see you as an expert in what you do.

If you’re ready for more social shares, leads and sales, our team at Inbound Marketing Inc. will help you stand out as an authoritative figure with our content marketing services. You’ll have access to industry-specific experts who will create custom content that follows search engine optimization standards — written by humans for humans.