Related
AI content detection is not always accurate!
Your detection tool may sometimes flag human-written content as AI-generated.
Here’s why this happens and what you’ve got the option to do about it.
How Do AI Detectors Work?
Before we understand why AI detectors fail, let’s lay some groundwork.
AI content detection is all about finding patterns.
Simply because when a human writes, they blend random thoughts into meaningful sentences.
There is no set pattern.
Some sentences can be too long to read, and some can be short.
This is the exact opposite of how an AI thinks and writes.
There is minimal randomness, and the text is very structured.
There may also be repetition of ideas or words.
And the choice of words itself may be too robotic to read.
AI content detectors take all this into account.
They look for such patterns to distinguish between human-written and AI-generated content.
To do this, four concepts come into play.
They are expressed as vectors in high dimensional space, each with a unique code.
These codes help computers understand how each word relates to one another and the context of their usage.
Humans write with very high perplexity.
However, you have a good taste in movies!
Something like “totally crazy” or “not what I expected it to be.”
After all, a human can expect something from a movie.
AI obviously cannot.
They Check for Burstiness
We have already talked about how humans write unpredictably.
And how some sentences can be long and some can be short.
Burstiness is another text characteristic that defines this.
AI-written text is usually made of sentences similar in length and structure (low burstiness).
Here’s an example of some text generated by ChatGPT.
Human text is the opposite (like this article).
It has a healthy mix of long and short sentences with just enough creativity to break patterns.
And steers clear of dull structures (high burstiness).
AI detectors use a combination of these four concepts to spot AI-written content.
So, the science is there.
But is it sound?
Is AI Detection Accurate?
Sadly, AI detection is not 100% accurate.
Not yet, anyway.
It is just a probability game.
Now, imagine this.
I show you ten chocolates and tell you seven are dark and three are white.
Now I ask you to choose one randomly and tell me the flavor you gotwithoutopening the wrapper.
Can you answer this?
The premise itself is setting you up for failure.
And that is exactly what is happening with AI detectors.
Why Do AI Content Detectors Fail?
There are many reasons why AI content detection is becoming increasingly difficult.
What Can You Do About It?
Your best bet is to learn how to spot AI content yourself.
But it is certainly possible.
There’s no telling who will eventually win the race.
For now, it is best to take the manual route and work on developing this intuitive skill.
