how to know if essay was written by ai

GPT Essay Checker for Students

How to Interpret the Result of AI Detection

To use our GPT checker, you won’t need to do any preparation work!

Take the 3 steps:

• Copy and paste the text you want to be analyzed,
• Click the button,
• Follow the prompts to interpret the result.

Our AI detector doesn’t give a definitive answer. It’s only a free beta test that will be improved later. For now, it provides a preliminary conclusion and analyzes the provided text, implementing the color-coding system that you can see above the analysis.

It is you who decides whether the text is written by a human or AI:

• Your text was likely generated by an AI if it is mostly red with some orange words. This means that the word choice of the whole document is nowhere near unique or unpredictable.
• Your text looks unique and human-made if our GPT essay checker adds plenty of orange, green, and blue to the color palette.
• 🔮 The Tool’s Benefits

🤖 Will AI Replace Human Writers?

✅ ai in essay writing.

• 🕵 How do GPT checkers work?

🔗 References

🔮 gpt checker for essays: 5 key benefits.

People have yet to learn where AI and machine learning are taking us, but it has already caused many problems in the education system. This AI essay detector can resolve some of them, at least as of the moment.

There are 5 key benefits of the above GPT checker for essays and other academic writing projects.

Elon Musk, one of Chat GPT creators, said that it was “scary good” and that humanity is approaching the creation of “dangerously strong AI.”

In an interview , Bill Gates commented on the program: “It gives a glimpse of what is to come. I am impressed with this whole approach and the rate of innovation.” And these words give us goosebumps.

Over the first week of its functioning, the program exceeded 1 million users . Therefore, developers are interested in monetizing it, and launching a paid Beta-version won’t take long.

We prefer not to throw out compliments to the chatbot and instead let you check for yourself . It is a chat with AI. The best way to start is to ask a question. It is free so far (still under research), so you can ask as many questions as you please.

We should care about AI-generated content because, in a decade, it will be an everyday reality. Even more so, it is a hot-button issue now. For now, GPT 3 can’t replace human writers. However, AI essay detection has already become an issue for teachers.

You can try asking ChatGPT to write an essay for you. But we do not recommend pass it off as written by you. Not only because it's unethical (although it is). The fact is that ChatGPT has a number of drawbacks that you need to consider before using it.

Chat GPT in Essay Writing – the Shortcomings

• The tool doesn’t know anything about what happened after 2021. Novel history is not its strong side. Sometimes it needs to be corrected about earlier events. For instance, request information about Heathrow Terminal 1 . The program will tell you it is functioning, although it has been closed since 2015.
• The reliability of answers is questionable. AI takes information from the web which abounds in fake news, bias, and conspiracy theories.
• References also need to be checked. The links that the tool generates are sometimes incorrect, and sometimes even fake.
• Two AI generated essays on the same topic can be very similar. Although a plagiarism checker will likely consider the texts original, your teacher will easily see the same structure and arguments.
• Chat GPT essay detectors are being actively developed now. Traditional plagiarism checkers are not good at finding texts made by ChatGPT. But this does not mean that an AI-generated piece cannot be detected at all.

🕵 How Do GPT Checkers Work?

An AI-generated text is too predictable. Its creation is based on the word frequency in each particular case.

Thus, its strong side (being life-like) makes it easily discernible for ChatGPT detectors.

Once again, conventional anti-plagiarism essay checkers won’t work there merely because this writing features originality. Meanwhile, it will be too similar to hundreds of other texts covering the same topic.

Here’s an everyday example. Two people give birth to a baby. When kids become adults, they are very much like their parents. But can we tell this particular human is a child of the other two humans? No, if we cannot make a genetic test. This GPT essay checker is a paternity test for written content.

❓ GPT Essay Checker FAQ

Updated: Oct 25th, 2023

• Abstracts written by ChatGPT fool scientists - Nature
• How to... use ChatGPT to boost your writing
• Will ChatGPT Kill the Student Essay? - The Atlantic
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This page contains a free online GPT checker for essays and other academic writing projects. Being based on the brand-new technology, this AI essay detector is much more effective than traditional plagiarism checkers. With this AI checker, you’ll easily find out if an academic writing piece was written by a human or a chatbot. We provide a comprehensive guide on how to interpret the results of analysis. It is up to you to draw your own conclusions.

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MIT Technology Review

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How to spot AI-generated text

The internet is increasingly awash with text written by AI software. We need new tools to detect it.

• Melissa Heikkilä archive page

This sentence was written by an AI—or was it? OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT, presents us with a problem: How will we know whether what we read online is written by a human or a machine?

Since it was released in late November, ChatGPT has been used by over a million people. It has the AI community enthralled, and it is clear the internet is increasingly being flooded with AI-generated text. People are using it to come up with jokes, write children’s stories, and craft better emails. 

ChatGPT is OpenAI’s spin-off of its large language model GPT-3 , which generates remarkably human-sounding answers to questions that it’s asked. The magic—and danger—of these large language models lies in the illusion of correctness. The sentences they produce look right—they use the right kinds of words in the correct order. But the AI doesn’t know what any of it means. These models work by predicting the most likely next word in a sentence. They haven’t a clue whether something is correct or false, and they confidently present information as true even when it is not. 

In an already polarized, politically fraught online world, these AI tools could further distort the information we consume. If they are rolled out into the real world in real products, the consequences could be devastating. 

We’re in desperate need of ways to differentiate between human- and AI-written text in order to counter potential misuses of the technology, says Irene Solaiman, policy director at AI startup Hugging Face, who used to be an AI researcher at OpenAI and studied AI output detection for the release of GPT-3’s predecessor GPT-2. 

New tools will also be crucial to enforcing bans on AI-generated text and code, like the one recently announced by Stack Overflow, a website where coders can ask for help. ChatGPT can confidently regurgitate answers to software problems, but it’s not foolproof. Getting code wrong can lead to buggy and broken software, which is expensive and potentially chaotic to fix. 

A spokesperson for Stack Overflow says that the company’s moderators are “examining thousands of submitted community member reports via a number of tools including heuristics and detection models” but would not go into more detail. 

In reality, it is incredibly difficult, and the ban is likely almost impossible to enforce.

Today’s detection tool kit

There are various ways researchers have tried to detect AI-generated text. One common method is to use software to analyze different features of the text—for example, how fluently it reads, how frequently certain words appear, or whether there are patterns in punctuation or sentence length. 

“If you have enough text, a really easy cue is the word ‘the’ occurs too many times,” says Daphne Ippolito, a senior research scientist at Google Brain, the company’s research unit for deep learning. 

Because large language models work by predicting the next word in a sentence, they are more likely to use common words like “the,” “it,” or “is” instead of wonky, rare words. This is exactly the kind of text that automated detector systems are good at picking up, Ippolito and a team of researchers at Google found in research they published in 2019.

But Ippolito’s study also showed something interesting: the human participants tended to think this kind of “clean” text looked better and contained fewer mistakes, and thus that it must have been written by a person. 

In reality, human-written text is riddled with typos and is incredibly variable, incorporating different styles and slang, while “language models very, very rarely make typos. They’re much better at generating perfect texts,” Ippolito says. 

“A typo in the text is actually a really good indicator that it was human written,” she adds. 

Large language models themselves can also be used to detect AI-generated text. One of the most successful ways to do this is to retrain the model on some texts written by humans, and others created by machines, so it learns to differentiate between the two, says Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, who is the Canada research chair in natural-language processing and machine learning at the University of British Columbia and has studied detection . 

Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas on secondment as a researcher at OpenAI for a year, meanwhile, has been developing watermarks for longer pieces of text generated by models such as GPT-3—“an otherwise unnoticeable secret signal in its choices of words, which you can use to prove later that, yes, this came from GPT,” he writes in his blog. 

A spokesperson for OpenAI confirmed that the company is working on watermarks, and said its policies state that users should clearly indicate text generated by AI “in a way no one could reasonably miss or misunderstand.” 

But these technical fixes come with big caveats. Most of them don’t stand a chance against the latest generation of AI language models, as they are built on GPT-2 or other earlier models. Many of these detection tools work best when there is a lot of text available; they will be less efficient in some concrete use cases, like chatbots or email assistants, which rely on shorter conversations and provide less data to analyze. And using large language models for detection also requires powerful computers, and access to the AI model itself, which tech companies don’t allow, Abdul-Mageed says. 

The bigger and more powerful the model, the harder it is to build AI models to detect what text is written by a human and what isn’t, says Solaiman. 

“What’s so concerning now is that [ChatGPT has] really impressive outputs. Detection models just can’t keep up. You’re playing catch-up this whole time,” she says. 

Training the human eye

There is no silver bullet for detecting AI-written text, says Solaiman. “A detection model is not going to be your answer for detecting synthetic text in the same way that a safety filter is not going to be your answer for mitigating biases,” she says. 

To have a chance of solving the problem, we’ll need improved technical fixes and more transparency around when humans are interacting with an AI, and people will need to learn to spot the signs of AI-written sentences. 

“What would be really nice to have is a plug-in to Chrome or to whatever web browser you’re using that will let you know if any text on your web page is machine generated,” Ippolito says.

Some help is already out there. Researchers at Harvard and IBM developed a tool called Giant Language Model Test Room (GLTR), which supports humans by highlighting passages that might have been generated by a computer program. 

But AI is already fooling us. Researchers at Cornell University found that people found fake news articles generated by GPT-2 credible about 66% of the time. 

Another study found that untrained humans were able to correctly spot text generated by GPT-3 only at a level consistent with random chance.  

The good news is that people can be trained to be better at spotting AI-generated text, Ippolito says. She built a game to test how many sentences a computer can generate before a player catches on that it’s not human, and found that people got gradually better over time. 

“If you look at lots of generative texts and you try to figure out what doesn’t make sense about it, you can get better at this task,” she says. One way is to pick up on implausible statements, like the AI saying it takes 60 minutes to make a cup of coffee.

Artificial intelligence

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. but nobody knows exactly why..

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

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What’s next for generative video

OpenAI's Sora has raised the bar for AI moviemaking. Here are four things to bear in mind as we wrap our heads around what's coming.

The AI Act is done. Here’s what will (and won’t) change

The hard work starts now.

Is robotics about to have its own ChatGPT moment?

Researchers are using generative AI and other techniques to teach robots new skills—including tasks they could perform in homes.

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A college student created an app that can tell whether AI wrote an essay

Emma Bowman

GPTZero in action: The bot correctly detected AI-written text. The writing sample that was submitted? ChatGPT's attempt at "an essay on the ethics of AI plagiarism that could pass a ChatGPT detector tool." GPTZero.me/Screenshot by NPR hide caption

GPTZero in action: The bot correctly detected AI-written text. The writing sample that was submitted? ChatGPT's attempt at "an essay on the ethics of AI plagiarism that could pass a ChatGPT detector tool."

Teachers worried about students turning in essays written by a popular artificial intelligence chatbot now have a new tool of their own.

Edward Tian, a 22-year-old senior at Princeton University, has built an app to detect whether text is written by ChatGPT, the viral chatbot that's sparked fears over its potential for unethical uses in academia.

Edward Tian, a 22-year-old computer science student at Princeton, created an app that detects essays written by the impressive AI-powered language model known as ChatGPT. Edward Tian hide caption

Edward Tian, a 22-year-old computer science student at Princeton, created an app that detects essays written by the impressive AI-powered language model known as ChatGPT.

Tian, a computer science major who is minoring in journalism, spent part of his winter break creating GPTZero, which he said can "quickly and efficiently" decipher whether a human or ChatGPT authored an essay.

His motivation to create the bot was to fight what he sees as an increase in AI plagiarism. Since the release of ChatGPT in late November, there have been reports of students using the breakthrough language model to pass off AI-written assignments as their own.

"there's so much chatgpt hype going around. is this and that written by AI? we as humans deserve to know!" Tian wrote in a tweet introducing GPTZero.

Tian said many teachers have reached out to him after he released his bot online on Jan. 2, telling him about the positive results they've seen from testing it.

More than 30,000 people had tried out GPTZero within a week of its launch. It was so popular that the app crashed. Streamlit, the free platform that hosts GPTZero, has since stepped in to support Tian with more memory and resources to handle the web traffic.

How GPTZero works

To determine whether an excerpt is written by a bot, GPTZero uses two indicators: "perplexity" and "burstiness." Perplexity measures the complexity of text; if GPTZero is perplexed by the text, then it has a high complexity and it's more likely to be human-written. However, if the text is more familiar to the bot — because it's been trained on such data — then it will have low complexity and therefore is more likely to be AI-generated.

Separately, burstiness compares the variations of sentences. Humans tend to write with greater burstiness, for example, with some longer or complex sentences alongside shorter ones. AI sentences tend to be more uniform.

In a demonstration video, Tian compared the app's analysis of a story in The New Yorker and a LinkedIn post written by ChatGPT. It successfully distinguished writing by a human versus AI.

A new AI chatbot might do your homework for you. But it's still not an A+ student

Tian acknowledged that his bot isn't foolproof, as some users have reported when putting it to the test. He said he's still working to improve the model's accuracy.

But by designing an app that sheds some light on what separates human from AI, the tool helps work toward a core mission for Tian: bringing transparency to AI.

"For so long, AI has been a black box where we really don't know what's going on inside," he said. "And with GPTZero, I wanted to start pushing back and fighting against that."

The quest to curb AI plagiarism

Untangling Disinformation

Ai-generated fake faces have become a hallmark of online influence operations.

The college senior isn't alone in the race to rein in AI plagiarism and forgery. OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has signaled a commitment to preventing AI plagiarism and other nefarious applications. Last month, Scott Aaronson, a researcher currently focusing on AI safety at OpenAI, revealed that the company has been working on a way to "watermark" GPT-generated text with an "unnoticeable secret signal" to identify its source.

The open-source AI community Hugging Face has put out a tool to detect whether text was created by GPT-2, an earlier version of the AI model used to make ChatGPT. A philosophy professor in South Carolina who happened to know about the tool said he used it to catch a student submitting AI-written work.

The New York City education department said on Thursday that it's blocking access to ChatGPT on school networks and devices over concerns about its "negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content."

Tian is not opposed to the use of AI tools like ChatGPT.

GPTZero is "not meant to be a tool to stop these technologies from being used," he said. "But with any new technologies, we need to be able to adopt it responsibly and we need to have safeguards."

AI Writing Detection

Turnitin's AI writing detection capability is designed to help educators identify text that might be prepared by a generative AI tool. Our AI writing detection model may not always be accurate (it may misidentify both human and AI-generated text) so it should not be used as the sole basis for adverse actions against a student. It takes further scrutiny and human judgment in conjunction with an organization's application of its specific academic policies to determine whether any academic misconduct has occurred.

This feature is only available for certain Turnitin licenses. Contact your account administrator to find out more

The AI writing indicator

When you open a Similarity Report, the AI writing indicator is in the side panel. After a short period of processing, the indicator will display one of three potential states:

The AI writing report

The AI writing report contains the overall percentage of prose sentences contained in a long-form writing format within the submitted document that Turnitin’s AI writing detection model determines was generated by AI. These sentences are highlighted in blue on the submission text in the AI writing report.

Prose text contained in long-form writing means individual sentences contained in paragraphs that make up a longer piece of written work, such as an essay, a dissertation, or an article, etc. The model does not reliably detect AI-generated text in the form of non-prose, such as poetry, scripts, or code, nor does it detect short-form/unconventional writing such as bullet points, tables, or annotated bibliographies.

This means that a document containing several different writing types would result in a disparity between the percentage and the highlights.

The percentage, generated by Turnitin’s AI writing detection model, is different and independent from the similarity score, and the AI writing highlights are not visible in the Similarity Report.

How do we detect AI-generated writing?

How Turnitin has made this determination is complex. To help our users understand Turnitin’s method of detecting AI writing text, we have created an extensive FAQ. Learn more about Turnitin’s AI writing detection tool .

AI detection will only work for content submitted in English. It will not process any non-English submissions. As we continue to iterate, we will keep you updated on developments around non-English language support.

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Mobile Navigation

New ai classifier for indicating ai-written text.

We’re launching a classifier trained to distinguish between AI-written and human-written text.

Illustration: Ruby Chen

As of July 20, 2023, the AI classifier is no longer available due to its low rate of accuracy. We are working to incorporate feedback and are currently researching more effective provenance techniques for text, and have made a commitment to develop and deploy mechanisms that enable users to understand if audio or visual content is AI-generated.

We’ve trained a classifier to distinguish between text written by a human and text written by AIs from a variety of providers. While it is impossible to reliably detect all AI-written text, we believe good classifiers can inform mitigations for false claims that AI-generated text was written by a human: for example, running  automated misinformation campaigns , using AI tools for academic dishonesty, and positioning an AI chatbot as a human.

Our classifier is not fully reliable.  In our evaluations on a “challenge set” of English texts, our classifier correctly identifies 26% of AI-written text (true positives) as “likely AI-written,” while incorrectly labeling human-written text as AI-written 9% of the time (false positives). Our classifier’s reliability typically improves as the length of the input text increases. Compared to our  previously released classifier , this new classifier is significantly more reliable on text from more recent AI systems.

We’re making this classifier publicly available to get feedback on whether imperfect tools like this one are useful. Our work on the detection of AI-generated text will continue, and we hope to share improved methods in the future.

Try our free work-in-progress classifier yourself:

Limitations

Our classifier has a number of important limitations.  It should not be used as a primary decision-making tool , but instead as a complement to other methods of determining the source of a piece of text.

• The classifier is very unreliable on short texts (below 1,000 characters). Even longer texts are sometimes incorrectly labeled by the classifier.
• Sometimes human-written text will be incorrectly but confidently labeled as AI-written by our classifier.
• We recommend using the classifier only for English text. It performs significantly worse in other languages and it is unreliable on code.
• Text that is very predictable cannot be reliably identified. For example, it is impossible to predict whether a list of the first 1,000 prime numbers was written by AI or humans, because the correct answer is always the same.
• AI-written text can be edited to evade the classifier. Classifiers like ours can be updated and retrained based on successful attacks, but it is unclear whether detection has an advantage in the long-term.
• Classifiers based on neural networks are known to be poorly calibrated outside of their training data. For inputs that are very different from text in our training set, the classifier is sometimes extremely confident in a wrong prediction.

Training the classifier

Our classifier is a language model fine-tuned on a dataset of pairs of human-written text and AI-written text on the same topic. We collected this dataset from a variety of sources that we believe to be written by humans, such as the pretraining data and human demonstrations on prompts submitted to  InstructGPT . We divided each text into a prompt and a response. On these prompts we generated responses from a variety of different language models trained by us and other organizations. For our web app, we adjust the confidence threshold to keep the false positive rate low; in other words, we only mark text as likely AI-written if the classifier is very confident.

Impact on educators and call for input

We recognize that identifying AI-written text has been an important point of discussion among educators, and equally important is recognizing the limits and impacts of AI generated text classifiers in the classroom. We have developed a  preliminary resource  on the use of ChatGPT for educators, which outlines some of the uses and associated limitations and considerations. While this resource is focused on educators, we expect our classifier and associated classifier tools to have an impact on journalists, mis/dis-information researchers, and other groups.

We are engaging with educators in the United States to learn what they are seeing in their classrooms and to discuss ChatGPT’s capabilities and limitations, and we will continue to broaden our outreach as we learn. These are important conversations to have as part of our mission is to deploy large language models safely, in direct contact with affected communities.

If you’re directly impacted by these issues (including but not limited to teachers, administrators, parents, students, and education service providers), please provide us with feedback using  this form . Direct feedback on the  preliminary resource  is helpful, and we also welcome any resources that educators are developing or have found helpful (e.g., course guidelines, honor code and policy updates, interactive tools, AI literacy programs).

Jan Hendrik Kirchner

Scott aaronson, acknowledgments, contributors.

Michael Lampe, Joanne Jang, Pamela Mishkin, Andrew Mayne, Henrique Ponde de Oliveira Pinto, Valerie Balcom, Michelle Pokrass, Jeff Belgum, Madelaine Boyd, Heather Schmidt, Sherwin Wu, Logan Kilpatrick, Thomas Degry

Student Creates App to Detect Essays Written by AI

In response to the text-generating bot ChatGPT, the new tool measures sentence complexity and variation to predict whether an author was human

Margaret Osborne

Daily Correspondent

In November, artificial intelligence company OpenAI released a powerful new bot called ChatGPT, a free tool that can generate text about a variety of topics based on a user’s prompts. The AI quickly captivated users across the internet, who asked it to write anything from song lyrics in the style of a particular artist to programming code.

But the technology has also sparked concerns of AI plagiarism among teachers, who have seen students use the app to write their assignments and claim the work as their own. Some professors have shifted their curricula because of ChatGPT, replacing take-home essays with in-class assignments, handwritten papers or oral exams, reports Kalley Huang for the New York Times . 

“[ChatGPT] is very much coming up with original content,” Kendall Hartley , a professor of educational training at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, tells Scripps News . “So, when I run it through the services that I use for plagiarism detection, it shows up as a zero.” 

Now, a student at Princeton University has created a new tool to combat this form of plagiarism: an app that aims to determine whether text was written by a human or AI. Twenty-two-year-old Edward Tian developed the app, called GPTZero , while on winter break and unveiled it on January 2. Within the first week of its launch, more than 30,000 people used the tool, per NPR ’s Emma Bowman. On Twitter, it has garnered more than 7 million views. 

GPTZero uses two variables to determine whether the author of a particular text is human: perplexity, or how complex the writing is, and burstiness, or how variable it is. Text that’s more complex with varied sentence length tends to be human-written, while prose that is more uniform and familiar to GPTZero tends to be written by AI.

But the app, while almost always accurate, isn’t foolproof. Tian tested it out using BBC articles and text generated by AI when prompted with the same headline. He tells BBC News ’ Nadine Yousif that the app determined the difference with a less than 2 percent false positive rate.

“This is at the same time a very useful tool for professors, and on the other hand a very dangerous tool—trusting it too much would lead to exacerbation of the false flags,” writes one GPTZero user, per the Guardian ’s Caitlin Cassidy. 

Tian is now working on improving the tool’s accuracy, per NPR. And he’s not alone in his quest to detect plagiarism. OpenAI is also working on ways that ChatGPT’s text can easily be identified. 

“We don’t want ChatGPT to be used for misleading purposes in schools or anywhere else,” a spokesperson for the company tells the Washington Post ’s Susan Svrluga in an email, “We’re already developing mitigations to help anyone identify text generated by that system.” One such idea is a watermark , or an unnoticeable signal that accompanies text written by a bot.

Tian says he’s not against artificial intelligence, and he’s even excited about its capabilities, per BBC News. But he wants more transparency surrounding when the technology is used. 

“A lot of people are like … ‘You’re trying to shut down a good thing we’ve got going here!’” he tells the Post . “That’s not the case. I am not opposed to students using AI where it makes sense. … It’s just we have to adopt this technology responsibly.”

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Margaret Osborne | | READ MORE

Margaret Osborne is a freelance journalist based in the southwestern U.S. Her work has appeared in the  Sag Harbor Express  and has aired on  WSHU Public Radio.

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

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Reece Rogers

Everything You Need to Know About AI Detectors for ChatGPT

Detecting when text has been generated by tools like ChatGPT is a difficult task. Popular artificial- intelligence -detection tools, like GPTZero, may provide some guidance for users by telling them when something was written by a bot and not a human, but even specialized software is not foolproof and can spit out false positives.

As a journalist who started covering AI detection over a year ago, I wanted to curate some of WIRED’s best articles on the topic to help readers like you better understand this complicated issue.

Have even more questions about spotting outputs from ChatGPT and other chatbot tools ? Sign up for my AI Unlocked newsletter , and reach out to me directly with anything AI-related that you would like answered or want WIRED to explore more.

How to Detect AI-Generated Text, According to Researchers

February 2023 by Reece Rogers

In this article, which was written about two months after the launch of ChatGPT, I started to grapple with the complexities of AI text detection as well as what the AI revolution might mean for writers who publish online. Edward Tian, the founder behind GPTZero , spoke with me about how his AI detector focuses on factors like text variance and randomness.

As you read, focus on the section about text watermarking: “A watermark might be able to designate certain word patterns to be off-limits for the AI text generator.” While a promising idea, the researchers I spoke with were already skeptical about its potential efficacy.

The AI Detection Arms Race Is On

September 2023 by Christopher Beam

A fantastic piece from last year’s October issue of WIRED, this article gives you an inside look into Edward Tian’s mindset as he worked to expand GPTZero’s reach and detection capabilities. The focus on how AI has impacted schoolwork is crucial.

AI text detection is top of mind for many classroom educators as they grade papers and, potentially, forgo essay assignments altogether due to students secretly using chatbots to complete homework assignments. While some students might use generative AI as a brainstorming tool, others are using it to fabricate entire assignments .

AI-Detection Startups Say Amazon Could Flag AI Books. It Doesn’t

September 2023 by Kate Knibbs

Do companies have a responsibility to flag products that might be generated by AI? Kate Knibbs investigated how potentially copyright-breaking AI-generated books were being listed for sale on Amazon , even though some startups believed the products could be spotted with special software and removed. One of the core debates about AI detection hinges on whether the potential for false positives—human-written text that’s accidentally flagged as the work of AI—outweighs the benefits of labeling algorithmically generated content.

Use of AI Is Seeping Into Academic Journals—and It’s Proving Difficult to Detect

August 2023 by Amanda Hoover

Going beyond just homework assignments, AI-generated text is appearing more in academic journals, where it is often forbidden without a proper disclosure . “AI-written papers could also draw attention away from good work by diluting the pool of scientific literature,” writes Amanda Hoover. One potential strategy for addressing this issue is for developers to build specialized detection tools that search for AI content within peer-reviewed papers.

Researchers Tested AI Watermarks—and Broke All of Them

October 2023 by Kate Knibbs

When I first spoke with researchers last February about watermarks for AI text detection, they were hopeful but cautious about the potential to imprint AI text with specific language patterns that are undetectable by human readers but obvious to detection software. Looking back, their trepidation seems well placed.

Just a half-year later, Kate Knibbs spoke with multiple sources who were smashing through AI watermarks and demonstrating their underlying weakness as a detection strategy. While not guaranteed to fail, watermarking AI text continues to be difficult to pull off.

Students Are Likely Writing Millions of Papers With AI

April 2024 by Amanda Hoover

One tool that teachers are trying to use to detect AI-generated classroom work is Turnitin , a plagiarism detection software that added AI spotting capabilities. (Turnitin is owned by Advance, the parent company of Condé Nast, which publishes WIRED.) Amanda Hoover writes, “Chechitelli says a majority of the service’s clients have opted to purchase the AI detection. But the risks of false positives and bias against English learners have led some universities to ditch the tools for now.”

AI detectors are more likely to falsely label written content from someone whose first language isn’t English as AI than that from someone who’s a native speaker. As developers continue to work on improving AI-detection algorithms, the problem of erroneous results remains a core obstacle to overcome.

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Turnitin's AI writing detection available now

Turnitin’s AI writing detection helps educators identify when AI writing tools such as ChatGPT may have been used in students’ submissions.

Academic integrity in the age of AI writing

Over the years, academic integrity has been both supported and tested by technology. Today, educators are facing a new frontier with AI writing and ChatGPT.

Here at Turnitin, we believe that AI can be a positive force that, when used responsibly, has the potential to support and enhance the learning process. We also believe that equitable access to AI tools is vital, which is why we’re working with students and educators to develop technology that can support and enhance the learning process. However, it is important to acknowledge new challenges alongside the opportunities.

We recognize that for educators, there is a pressing and immediate need to know when and where AI and AI writing tools have been used by students. This is why we are now offering AI detection capabilities for educators in our products.

Gain insights on how much of a student’s submission is authentic, human writing versus AI-generated from ChatGPT or other tools.

Reporting identifies likely AI-written text and provides information educators need to determine their next course of action. We’ve designed our solution with educators, for educators.

AI writing detection complements Turnitin’s similarity checking workflow and is integrated with your LMS, providing a seamless, familiar experience.

Turnitin’s AI writing detection capability available with Originality, helps educators identify AI-generated content in student work while safeguarding the interests of students.

Turnitin AI Innovation Lab

Welcome to the Turnitin AI Innovation Lab, a hub for new and upcoming product developments in the area of AI writing. You can follow our progress on detection initiatives for AI writing, ChatGPT, and AI-paraphrasing.

Understanding the false positive rate for sentences of our AI writing detection capability

We’d like to share more insight on our sentence level false positive rate and tips on how to use our AI writing detection metrics.

Understanding false positives within our AI writing detection capabilities

We’d like to share some insight on how our AI detection model deals with false positives and what constitutes a false positive.

Have questions? Read these FAQs on Turnitin’s AI writing detection capabilities

Helping solve the AI writing puzzle one piece at a time

AI-generated writing has transformed every aspect of our lives, including the classroom. However, identifying AI writing in students’ submissions is just one piece in the broader, complex, ever-evolving AI writing puzzle.

Research corner

We regularly undertake internal research to ensure our AI writing detector stays accurate and up-to-date. If you are interested in what external testing has revealed about Turnitin's AI-writing detection capabilities, check out the links below. Notably, these studies position Turnitin among the foremost solutions in identifying AI-generated content within academia.

Research shows Turnitin's AI detector shows no statistically significant bias against English Language Learners

• In response to feedback from customers and papers claiming that AI writing detection tools are biased against writers whose first language is not English, Turnitin expanded its false positive evaluation to include writing samples of English Language Learners (ELL) and tested another nearly 2,000 writing samples of ELL writers.
• What Turnitin found was that in documents meeting the 300 word count requirement, ELL writers received a 0.014 false positive rate and native English writers received a 0.013.
• This means that there is no statistically significant bias against non-native English speakers.

Turnitin’s AI writing detector identified as the most accurate out of 16 detectors tested

• Two of the 16 detectors, Turnitin and Copyleaks, correctly identified the AI- or human-generated status of all 126 documents, with no incorrect or uncertain responses.
• Three AI text detectors – Turnitin, Originality, and Copyleaks, – have very high accuracy with all three sets of documents examined for this study: GPT-3.5 papers, GPT-4 papers, and human-generated papers.
• Of the top three detectors identified in this investigation, Turnitin achieved very high accuracy in all five previous evaluations. Copyleaks, included in four earlier analyses, performed well in three of them.

Teaching in the age of AI writing

As AI text generators like ChatGPT quickly evolve, our educator resources will, too. Curated and created by our team of veteran educators, our resources help educators meet these new challenges. They are built for professional learning and outline steps educators can take immediately to guide students in maintaining academic integrity when faced with AI writing tools.

A guide to help educators determine which resource is more applicable to their instructional situation: the AI misuse checklist or the AI misuse rubric.

A guide sharing strategies educators can consider to help when confronted with a false positive.

A guide sharing strategies students can consider to help when confronted with a false positive.

The Turnitin Educator Network is a space to meet, discuss and share best practices on academic integrity in the age of AI.

Learn more about AI writing in our blog

Written by experts in the field, educators, and Turnitin professionals, our blog offers resources and thought leadership in support of students, instructors, and administrators. Dive into articles on a variety of important topics, including academic integrity, assessment, and instruction in a world with artificial intelligence.

In this blog post, we’re going to address frequently asked questions about AI writing tool misuse for students. Specifically, what does AI writing tool misuse look like? How can you self-check to make sure you’re using AI writing tools properly?

Stay up to date with the latest blog posts delivered directly to your inbox.

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Never miss an update or announcement. Visit our media center for recent news coverage and press releases.

Cheat GPT? Turnitin CEO Chris Caren weighs in on combating A.I. plagiarism | CNBC Squawk Box

Since the inception of AI-generated writing, educators and institutions are learning how to navigate it in the classroom. Turnitin’s CEO Chris Caren joins ‘Squawk Box’ to discuss how it is being used in the classroom and how educators can identify AI writing in student submissions.

Trouble viewing? View the video on YouTube or adjust your cookie preferences .

Some U.S. schools banning AI technology while others embrace it | NBC Nightly News

ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence program, can write college-level essays in seconds. While some school districts are banning it due to cheating concerns, NBC News’ Jacob Ward has details on why some teachers are embracing the technology.

BestColleges

Artificial intelligence, it seems, is taking over the world. At least that's what alarmists would have you believe . The line between fact and fiction continues to blur, and recognizing what is real versus what some bot concocted grows increasingly difficult with each passing week.

ThriveinEDU Podcast

On this episode of the ThriveinEDU podcast, host Rachelle Dené Poth speaks with Turnitin’s Chief Product Officer Annie Chechitelli about her role in the organization, her experience as a parent with school-age children learning to navigate AI writing, and the future of education and original thought.

District Administration

Following the one year anniversary of the public launch of ChatGPT, Chief Product Officer Annie Chechitelli sits down with the publication to discuss Turnitin’s AI writing detection feature and what the educational community has learned.

For press and media inquiries, contact us at [email protected]

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How to tell if something is written by AI

A Princeton student built an app which can detect if ChatGPT wrote an essay to combat AI-based plagiarism

• A Princeton student built an app that aims to tell if essays were written by AIs like ChatGPT.
• The app analyzes text to see how randomly it is written, allowing it to detect if it was written by AI.
• The website hosting the app, built by Edward Tian, crashed due to high traffic.

A new app can detect whether your essay was written by ChatGPT, as researchers look to combat AI plagiarism.

Edward Tian, a computer science student at Princeton, said he spent the holiday period building GPTZero.

Related stories

He shared two videos comparing the app's analysis of a New Yorker article and a letter written by ChatGPT. It correctly identified that they were respectively written by a human and AI.

—Edward Tian (@edward_the6) January 3, 2023

GPTZero scores text on its "perplexity and burstiness" – referring to how complicated it is and how randomly it is written. 

The app was so popular that it crashed "due to unexpectedly high web traffic," and currently displays a beta-signup page . GPTZero is still available to use on Tian's Streamlit page, after the website hosts stepped in to increase its capacity.

Tian, a former data journalist with the BBC, said that he was motivated to build GPTZero after seeing increased instances of AI plagiarism.

"Are high school teachers going to want students using ChatGPT to write their history essays? Likely not," he tweeted.

The Guardian recently reported that ChatGPT is introducing its own system to combat plagiarism by making it easier to identify, and watermarking the bot's output.

That follows The New York Times' report that Google issued a "code red" alert over the AI's popularity.  

Insider's Beatrice Nolan also tested ChatGPT to write cover letters for job applications , with one hiring manager saying she'd have got an interview, though another said the letter lacked personality.

Tian added that he's planning to publish a paper with accuracy stats using student journalism articles as data, alongside Princeton's Natural Language Processing group. 

OpenAI and Tian didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, sent outside US working hours. 

Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, has a global deal to allow OpenAI to train its models on its media brands' reporting.

• Main content

Identifying   AI-Written   Essays:   A   Step-by-Step   Guide   for   Teachers

Students have already started using ChatGPT to assist them in writing essays like maniacs. Instead of spending the effort required to practice their writing skills and come up with their own ideas, they rely on ChatGPT for AI-written Essays. Teachers have been trying to find ways to counter this practice without much success.

In our previous article, we discussed 5 ways that ChatGPT could assist you with your work. In this article, we will show you what you need to do to find out if a student has cheated using AI software.  

Steps for identifying AI-written Essays

Up until now, the software we had at our disposal, even the commercial ones, such as Turnitin, could only help us discover plagiarised content, not AI-written ones. So, what do we do to counter AI-written essays?

Step 1. Look for issues with the content

The first thing you need to look for is signs of unnatural language, such as repetitive sentence structures or overly complex vocabulary, which are common characteristics of text generated by machine learning models.

ChatGPT can’t fully understand the context or meaning of the text it generates and, therefore, often repeats phrases or uses words that may not be suitable for the particular context.

Step 2. Compare the Essay with the student's previous performance

Next, you need to compare the student’s writing style and use of language throughout the academic year with the essay they have submitted, and you suspect trickery. For example, suppose a student has demonstrated a certain language and writing style throughout the academic year and suddenly gives you a significantly more advanced essay or an essay written in a completely different style from their usual one. In that case, this could be a sign that the student has cheated.

Still, this method can be subjective and prone to mistakes. So, what should you do next to confirm if there was cheating?

Step 3. Use an AI-detection software

Now, you have to fight back, using the same weapons as the potential perpetrator. These weapons are the AI-detection software and can increase the likelihood of identifying cheating.

Option 1: AI Content Detector

Let’s begin with our first choice, called AI Content Detector.  To use it:

• First, go to https://writer.com/ai-content-detector/ .
• Next, copy and paste the student’s essay within the “add some text” field.
• Then we click “Analyze Text”.
• After it’s done analysing, it will come up with a result labelled as AI detection score on the top right side of our screen. The AI Content Detector will point out how much AI-generated text was found within the essay.

Obviously, the AI Content Detector is not flawless . But it’s free and works OK, especially if the student hasn’t made any substantial edits to the generated Essay they received from ChatGPT. In any case, you can use AI Content Detector for free as long as the text you input is less than 1500 words. If you want more, you can always upgrade to a paid plan for 162$ per year.

Option 2: ZeroGPT

Our next choice is called ZeroGPT . ZeroGPT is free and was exclusively developed for identifying essays generated by ChatGPT .

ZeroGPT’s developers claim that it has a detection rate of around 98.5% .

Actually, I tested their claim. The results were incredible. ZeroGPT accurately identified all text written by ChatGPT’s AI during my test runs. It is even more potent than the AI Content Detector as it uses advanced algorithms to identify foul plays.

• To use it, first, you have to visit https://www.zerogpt.com/ .
• Next, you copy and paste the text within the empty field. There’s no restriction to the number of words you can input. 
• Now you have to press the Detect Text button. ZeroGPT will analyse your input, and within a few seconds, it will come up with a result defining if the text was written either by ChatGPT or by a real person.

Bottom line

As the AI language models become more sophisticated, they make it increasingly hard to distinguish between human-written and AI-generated text. Thankfully, programmers have already started to come up with new software that can help teachers identify content that was not written by their students. Please note that the AI Content Detector and ZeroGPT aren’t the only choices available at the moment, but they are free and work well in most cases.

In conclusion, keeping an eye out for unnatural language and comparing a student’s writing style throughout the year, as well as using AI detection software, can help you identify AI-written content, at least on some level. 

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OpenAI Releases Tool To Detect AI-Written Content

Learn about the new OpenAI Text Classifier, what it can and cannot do, and how it can be used as a starting point for detecting AI-generated content.

• OpenAI's AI Text Classifier can help to detect AI-generated content, but it is not 100% accurate and can make mistakes.
• It can mislabel both AI-generated and human-written text, and it can also be evaded with minor edits.
• The AI Text Classifier should not be the sole piece of evidence used when making a verdict about whether AI generated a document.

OpenAI, the AI research firm behind ChatGPT, has released a new tool to distinguish between AI-generated and human-generated text.

Even though it’s impossible to detect AI-written text with 100% accuracy, OpenAI believes its new tool can help to mitigate false claims that humans wrote AI-generated content.

In an announcement , OpenAI says its new AI Text Classifier can limit the ability to run automated misinformation campaigns, use AI tools for academic fraud, and impersonate humans with chatbots.

When tested on a set of English texts, the tool could correctly say if the text was written by AI 26% of the time. But it also wrongly thought that human-written text was written by AI 9% of the time.

OpenAI says its tool works better the longer the text is, which could be why it requires a minimum of 1,000 characters to run a test.

Other limitations of the new OpenAI Text Classifier include the following:

• Can mislabel both AI-generated and human-written text.
• AI-generated text can evade the classifier with minor edits.
• Can get things wrong with text written by children and on text not in English because it was primarily trained on English content written by adults.

With that in mind, let’s look at how it performs.

Related: AI Text Detection Software: Can They Detect ChatGPT?

Using OpenAI’s AI Text Classifier

The AI Text Classifier from OpenAI is simple to use.

Log in, paste the text you want to test, and hit the submit button.

The tool will rate the likelihood that AI generated the text you submitted. Results range from the following:

• Very unlikely
• Unclear if it is

I tested it by asking ChatGPT to write an essay about SEO, then submitting the text verbatim to the AI Text Classifier.

It rated the ChatGPT-generated essay as possibly generated by AI, which is a strong but uncertain indicator.

This result illustrates the tool’s limitations, as it couldn’t say with a high degree of certainty that the ChatGPT-generated text was written by AI.

By applying minor edits suggested by Grammarly, I reduced the rating from possibly to unclear .

OpenAI is correct in stating that it’s easy to evade the classifier. However, it’s not meant to be the only evidence that AI wrote something.

In a FAQ section at the bottom of the page, OpenAI states:

“Our intended use for the AI Text Classifier is to foster conversation about the distinction between human-written and AI-generated content. The results may help, but should not be the sole evidence when deciding whether a document was generated with AI. The model is trained on human-written text from a variety of sources, which may not be representative of all kinds of human-written text.”

OpenAI adds that the tool hasn’t been thoroughly tested to detect content containing a combination of AI and human-written text.

Ultimately, the AI Text Classifier can be a valuable resource for flagging potentially AI-generated text, but it shouldn’t be used as a definitive measure for making a verdict.

Featured Image: IB Photography/Shutterstock

Matt G. Southern, Senior News Writer, has been with Search Engine Journal since 2013. With a bachelor’s degree in communications, ...

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How To Check If Something Was Written with AI (ChatGPT)

Anyone who has spent a few minutes playing around with ChatGPT has most likely been amazed. But we're starting to see a lot more AI-written content. Thus, it's getting harder and harder to tell which have actually been written by people like you and me.

It's not always clear, and it's definitely not provable, but there are tools that help assist this process. After over a year of researching how to detect AI, here are my technical and non-technical methods you can use to check if something was written or generated using AI.

How To Tell If An Article Was Written With AI

Detecting AI-generated content requires multiple samples of writing and various tools and still involves an aspect of predictability. Please do not rely on a single method of AI content detection to claim something was written with AI.

Even I still find myself getting stumped depending on the complexity of the AI used, especially as AI gets better. But here are tools and methods to help you spot an AI’s writing:

Use CopyLeaks AI Detector

A free AI detector that's popped up with good reliability has been Copyleaks . The detector alerts you if it believes something is AI-written or human-generated with no extra fluff.

You input texts, at least 350 characters minimum, and it’ll check for AI content in seconds. The best part: you can check up to 2000 pages worth of content with no character limits. All for free!

The tool supports GPT-4 in addition to older GPT versions, along with other generative AI outputs like Bloom, Jaspr, and Rytr. You can check out their published report if you want to read about their accuracy studies.

They also offer a basic and enhanced detection model. For the latter, you'll be asked to create an account. This doesn't change anything regarding the AI Content Detector tool, but it does give you an overview of other features Copyleaks has to offer. 

They also have a free Chrome extension that allows you to check directly within your browser. Compared to its Web-based platform, the extension can only account for a maximum of 25,000 characters.

Utilize Undetectable AI's Multi-Detection Tool

Undetectable AI is my next suggestion to help predict if something was written with AI. The tool works by checking content through a fine-tuned model that’s been trained off batched documents submitted to each of the AI detectors they feature (Sapling, GPTZero, etc).

Behind the scenes, the tool assigns a likelihood based on its training to give a predictable result. So, when using Undetectable AI, it basically detects whether the sample writing is AI-writing. This is done based on 8 different variations of detectors at once.

To use Undetectable's AI Checker , paste your sample of writing inside the input box & submit it for testing! You'll see results from popular detection tools like GPTZero , Writer, Crossplag, Copyleaks , Sapling, Content At Scale , and ZeroGPT .

It’s also free to use until you hit the word limit, then it’ll ask you to make an account.

Originality.ai's Detector & Text Visualizer

If you want to go a step further than testing your article across various detection tools, you could use Originality AI to both check & visualize the writing progression. Originality is the harshest AI detection software I've ever used (take that as you wish).

The text visualizer feature is what sets it apart from many other AI writing detectors. If you are getting anything submitted to you through Google Docs, you can check the writing with Originality & then rebuild the article using their visualizer to see if it involved a lot of copy-pasting.

It looks something like this:

Combine this with their writing detection tool and you'll have some really good intuition as to the origins of your suspected writing. In the example above, I actually gave a task to a writer I hired and they used AI to generate about half of it.

You can see it clearly when things get copied and pasted before getting tweaked.

Originality uses a combination of GPT-4 and other natural language models (all trained on a massive amount of data) to determine if submitted writing seems predictable.

You can install their Chrome extension to test their AI detector tool on your writings. However, it’s limited to 500 words as you are given only 50 free credits (1 credit scans 100 words).

They have 2 pricing options:

• $30 for a one-time fee, giving you 3000 credits and a 2-year expiry date.
• $14.95 monthly, providing you with 2000 credits. It also saves you about 25% and can be canceled anytime. 

As a bonus feature, you can also fact-check information at 10 words per credit. Plagiarism also gets detected by default at 100 words per credit.

Remember, 5% AI doesn't mean 5% of the sample was written with AI. It means if you flipped 100 coins to predict whether something was written with AI, the detection tool would guess it was AI 5 out of those 100 times.

Teachers have been confusing these percentage values, and it's ended up getting students in trouble , which hasn't been too good to hear.

Regarding plagiarism, it's also very impressive. Originality was able to find the exact blog I "copied" the content from and marked the text as being copied from a website (this one!!!). For what it's worth, combining AI detection with a plagiarism checker is an additional measure to be even more confident about the origins of written content.

Originality has been my go-to tool for anyone looking to bulk test writing.

They will also keep your scans saved in your account dashboard for easy access in the future.

Acceptable Detection Scores

According to the CEO of Originality AI, their AI detector only tells the probability of a text written by an AI or Human. So he suggests a range of acceptable detection scores depending on a company’s practice:  

• Zero AI Usage: 65-90%+ Human
• AI-assisted Research: 50-75% Human
• Edited AI-generated Content: 50-60% Human

The longer sample you input increases the chance of detection being more reliable (larger sample sizes = more reliable detection). But reliability doesn't mean accuracy! Also, the more content you scan by the same writer, the better you will know when deciding if their writing is legitimate.

Just be careful, as some results end up with false positives and false negatives. It is best to review a series of articles and make a call on a writer/service. Which is far better than passing judgment on a single article or text snippet.

Run It Through GPTZero

I like GPTZero because they seem to be one of the only AI detection companies that really cares about what they flag. While they can't promise 100% accurate detection, they only tend to mark something as AI if they're confident about it. You can read our full review if you want to learn more.

They focus more on academic and educational writing, with a goal of being used in the classroom. The tool is run by a team of talented ML & software engineers and built on 7 "components" of tech, likely making it the most accurate and reliable AI detection tool that is publicly available today. You can also upload files to it, which makes it even more efficient.

Content at Scale AI Detector (casual writing & free)

The team over at Content at Scale released a free AI detector that is also super quick and efficient. It can also test up to 2,500  characters at a time, which is about 300-500 words. 

To use the tool, paste the writing into the detection field and submit it. In just a few seconds, you'll see an overall score on the right. 

These scores are a simplified explanation of what's going on behind the scenes. Human-produced writing is not very predictable because it doesn't always follow patterns. AI writing is the opposite, it only knows patterns.   

A big part of how AI prediction works is by trying to recreate patterns . They are great indicators because AI generators are literally trained to recognize them to produce what "fits" existing patterns the best. The more your text matches existing formats of writing, the higher the probability it was generated.

The tool will also show you a line-by-line breakdown highlighting which parts of your content have been flagged as human, suspicious, or blatant AI. It will also give tips on how to improve each part!

Below are two screenshots of a ChatGPT output compared to human writing. 

The Technical & Syntactical Signs

The next way to tell if an AI has generated a piece of content is to look at the technical aspects of the writing. This isn't as concrete & may seem obvious, but if you're having trouble with the previous tools or just want to break down further writing you've come across, you should look deep at the content. Here are a few things to look for:

1. Watch out for Transitional Words. ChatGPT loves to use transitional words. Every few lines, it'll insert another one. Words like ‘Furthermore,’ ‘Additionally,’ ‘Moreover,’ ‘Consequently,’ and ‘Hence’ are frequently written but don't always appear in human writing. We don't really "transition" our writing unless it's something more formal or professional.

2. Big vocabulary words are suspicious.

‘Utilized,’ ‘implemented,’ ‘leveraged,’ ‘elucidated,’ and ‘ascertained’ are often overused. But what human talks like that in a general article they would write? Almost none.

In human conversations, simpler terms like ‘used’, ‘explained,’ and ‘found’ are more common and relatable.

If you've tested creative and unique content using one of the detection tools, I'd say it's in the clear. You need to look further into the technical content that comes off as confidently fishy.

3. Repetition of words and phrases: Another way to spot AI-generated content is by looking for repetition of words and phrases. This is the result of the AI trying to fill up space with relevant keywords (aka – it doesn't really know what it's talking about).

So, if you're reading an article and it feels like the same word is being used over and over again, there's a higher chance an AI wrote it. Some of the spammy AI-generation SEO tools love keyword-stuffing articles. Keyword stuffing is when you repeat a word or phrase so many times that it sounds unnatural.

Some articles have their target keyword in what feels like every other sentence. Once you spot it, you won't be able to focus on the article. It's also extremely off-putting for readers.

4. Lack of analysis: A third way to tell if an AI wrote an article is if it lacks complex analysis. Machines are good at collecting data, but they're not so good at turning it into something meaningful.

If you're reading an article and it feels like it's just a list of facts with no real insight or analysis, there's an even higher chance it was written with AI. With ChatGPT , we're nearing the point where AI is able to start to analyze writing, but I still find responses to be very "robotic."

People are starting to use AI to reply to tweets but don't realize how painfully cookie-cutter their responses are! You'll notice AI-generated writing is a lot better for static writing (like about history, facts, etc) compared to creative or analytical writing. The more information a topic has, the better AI can write & manipulate it.

5. Hallucination of Inaccurate data: This one is more common in AI-generated product descriptions but can also be found in blog posts and articles. THIS IS A HUGE INDICATOR! Since machines collect data from various sources, they sometimes make mistakes or use outdated information.

If a machine doesn't know something but is required to give an output, it'll predict numbers based on patterns (which aren't accurate). This happens all the time and is (in my opinion) the easiest predictor of AI.

So, if you're reading an article and you spot several discrepancies between the facts and the numbers, you can be very confident that what you just read was written using AI. If you come across spammy content, report it to Google. Save someone else the pain of having to waste their time reading something that is clearly inaccurate!

Verify The Sources & Author's Credibility

This one might seem a bit unnecessary for a single blog, but it's still worth mentioning. If you're reading an article and the domain seems to be randomly associated with the content posted, that's your first red flag.

But more importantly, you should check the sources that are being used in the article (if any). If an author is using sources from questionable websites or simply declares things without any source, it's either:

• The author isn't doing their research, or 
• They could simply be automating a bunch of AI-generated content.

If you're trying to check an article on Google, click the menu and see all the information Google has on the site. Here's what that looks like for us:

You can see we were indexed by Google about 2 years ago, but Google doesn't really know too much about us yet. Combine this with your own judgment to make your decision if something seems to be trustworthy.

OpenAI Even Discontinued Their Official AI Detector

The company behind the madness themselves, OpenAI, released a tool a few months ago to help detect writing. Using the official tool, OpenAI had initially claimed only 26% of AI-written samples they tested were identified properly as AI.

With some doubt from the online marketing & writing community about the tool's accuracy, it seems like they were actually correct as OpenAI discontinued & removed their own AI detection tool from the website on July 20th, 2023:

As of July 20, 2023, the AI classifier is no longer available due to its low rate of accuracy. We are working to incorporate feedback and are currently researching more effective provenance techniques for text, and have made a commitment to develop and deploy mechanisms that enable users to understand if audio or visual content is AI-generated. https://openai.com/blog/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai-written-text

My initial thoughts on the detection tool were it really looked like a coin toss. I tested many outputs from ChatGPT and got "unable to tell" and "unlikely written by AI." I never used the tool.

Gold Penguin's AI Detection Tool

A few weeks ago I got together with a development team and had them create us our very own AI detection tool . I was not happy using tools that over-detected a lot of writing. If it's THAT hard to decipher if something was written with AI or not – I'll just leave it as it is.

I didn't want anything to get detected when it wasn't, even if that meant I would let some actual AI get through. But that's fine, this technology can't accurately detect everything anyways.

The tool is free and, like every other tool, should only be taken with a grain of salt. It's great for letting you know if something is OBVIOUSLY AI, but for more intricate tools, you should probably use another tool.

What's Going To Happen Next?

It's not the easiest to tell if an AI wrote an article because you truthfully can't be sure. To make matters worse, AI just gets so much better each day. What is GPT-5 going to look like in a few months? I can't even imagine.

That said if you're questioning whether an article was written by an AI, your best bet is to use a combination of all of these tools and your own judgment. Test multiple papers by the same author for further reliability.

Make sure to remember to take the results you see with a grain of salt. Nothing you see is conclusive in any way, shape, or form since there's no concrete way to detect AI. Keep in mind that what you're working with leaves no watermark; you're just looking at words on a screen.

Hopefully, these new tools will benefit us, primarily by allowing skeptics to filter out AI-generated content on the Internet, in the news, and in school systems worldwide.

As AI becomes more sophisticated, the line between human and machine-generated content becomes increasingly blurry. It's only a matter of time until everything reaches the point where AI-generated content becomes indistinguishable.

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How to prove your essay wasn’t written by AI: 7 steps to prove authorship

S ince ChatGPT broke the internet last fall, everyone had something to say about AI, but none as much as teachers. In the first month since its arrival, educators bemoaned the end of writing assignments and complained that students could now plagiarize without being discovered. Almost immediately, detection tools started appearing designed to uphold academic integrity and catch cheaters. This spring, Turnitin developed its own AI detector, making it available to over two million teachers and claiming 98% accuracy.

However, many independent investigations, including student activist groups and high-profile journalists, have been showing mixed results for Turnitin’s product and free detector tools available online, such as GPTZero or OpenAI’s own Classifier.

Of course, it might bother hard-working students to learn that some fake papers generated with AI by their less scrupulous peers fly under the radar and get them good grades for nothing. However, more disturbingly, they might find themselves in a situation where their proper work receives a “false positive” from a detector, and their integrity is questioned.

How likely is your hand-written essay to be marked as AI-assisted, and how can honest paper writers prove they didn’t use AI assistance to create the work they submit? In this article, we will give you a few tips on demonstrating you’ve written your paper yourself when your instructor suspects you of cheating.

Why detectors aren’t reliable

First of all, none of the existing detectors claims to be 100% accurate. All they can show is statistical probability. Even a combination of several detectors cannot definitively answer whether a piece of text is human-written or AI-generated. Sometimes, different detectors provide widely different scores, which is very confusing. This, however, doesn’t prevent some instructors from perceiving this tentative probability assessment as hard fact and giving a student 0% for their work with an accusation of academic dishonesty to boot.

Despite claiming low inaccuracy rates, detectors are playing a catching-up game against the growing sophistication of the Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 and Bard. One of the ways for detectors to stay relevant is by raising the bar for the text to be marked as human. However, this has an unfortunate side effect: more false positives. This means more students whose honest work is marked as cheating, which can have devastating consequences for young people, especially when submitting their college admission essays or personal statements for scholarship applications.

Another challenging aspect of AI detection is that it’s not as straightforward as plagiarism detection. There are no source documents to reference as proof. It means that the teacher is left with nothing more than statistical probability and gut feeling to decide whether the paper is original or not, leading to bias and unfairness.

Finally, the texts that detectors are supposed to sniff out are consistently average and predictable. Being based on large amounts of human-generated content, they produce the mean average, so to speak. However, some writers, especially new and unskilled writers, like many students, tend to be average. They, too, imitate texts they’ve read, especially in terminology-heavy subjects that leave little place for personal style, like economics, math, physics, etc.

What can you do to prove you’ve written your paper without AI?

As you can see, your essay being flagged as AI-generated isn’t all that improbable. This can happen to anyone, even to a hard-working student like you. When this happens, how can you prove your innocence?

First of all, keep your cool. As unpleasant as it is to be unfairly accused, making a scene won’t help your case. Take a deep breath, and count to ten. Get things into perspective: These accusations happen often and are bound to become even more frequent, so you are not the only one in this situation. Staying calm and rational will help you gather the evidence you need to prove your authorship.

1. Gather your sources

To defend yourself against false accusations of cheating, it’s vital to restore the timeline of your work. Collect all the sources and materials you used while working on your assignment: books, articles, videos, and other types of content that inspired you, such as samples from a free essay writer service or topical blogs . Don’t forget to document collaboration efforts, feedback from your peers that contributed to your final submission, emails, discussions in messengers, etc.

2. Provide draft history

Outlines and drafts are the most compelling evidence of your authorship. If you prepared your essay in Google Docs, that should be easy, as the app has the “Revision history” feature. It automatically takes snapshots of your drafts and stores them. In Word, if your file is stored in OneDrive or SharePoint, you can go back to previous copies too. If you use another word processor, it may depend on a particular version you have. Still, in some cases, you can retrieve past drafts.

If your processor doesn’t keep changes history, consider saving each iteration of your draft as a separate file for the future, or getting a browser extension like Draftback, if you use a browser version of a word processor.

3. Restore the timeline

When you have all this, organize your material chronologically, demonstrating how your work evolved. Document when you started working on your assignment, the milestones in its completion, and what changes you made after finding another relevant source or consulting your instructor. This way, you can prove that you built your essay step by step instead of copying it from an AI generator and pasting it into your word processor.

Of course, it seems frustrating and unfair that you should do all this legwork to prove you didn’t cheat, but this is the only way to deter the accusations.

4. Learn your rights

Understanding school policies on academic integrity and your rights within them is crucial for defending yourself. Consult official documents like course syllabus, student handbook, writing center memos, university code of honor, etc. Pay attention to requirements and deadlines for submitting appeals and requesting reviews.

Also, be aware of the consequences of academic dishonesty under your school’s policies to know where you stand and what is at stake.

5. State your case

Now you’ve gathered all the evidence, communicate with your professor or academic integrity advisor to defend yourself. Reach out via email, explain the situation, and present your evidence. Make sure to express your concern about the accusation politely and respectfully. Don’t accuse, don’t pose ultimatums, and don’t demand immediate decisions. Just describe the matter and clearly state that you didn’t use ChatGPT or other AI tools.

If email communication won’t be enough to thoroughly review the case, request a meeting or a video call. Be open to questions and encourage your professor to quiz you on the topic or ask about your writing process.

6. Be honest

In this case, more than ever, honesty is the best policy. Own up to your mistakes. If you asked someone to edit the final draft for you or if you’ve used AI for some portions of your draft, for example, to write a conclusion or to generate the initial outline, better say it as it is. If you are an ESL student and you’ve written the essay in your first language and used ChatGPT to translate it, fess up and point out that your ideas were genuine.

Tell about the challenges you faced while working on your assignment to provide the context and dimension to your case and demonstrate your commitment. Explain your thought process and the evolution of your ideas. However, don’t blow things out of proportion and stick to the facts.

7. Offer alternative verification methods

If all this wasn’t enough to clear your name, suggest alternative methods to test your knowledge and verify the originality of your work, such as an oral examination or re-writing the essay in class under observation to prove your knowledge of the topic and mastery of the course material.

Although AI detection tools aren’t perfect and got you into trouble in the first place, you might attempt to defend yourself by presenting scores from instruments other than the one used by your school, for example, Sapling, Content at Scale, or Copyleaks. Even if it doesn’t prove your innocence beyond a reasonable doubt, the mere discrepancy of scores should raise questions about the effectiveness of AI detection.

Finally, you can ask your instructor to compare the essay to your other written assignments to prove the consistency of your style.

Being wrongly accused of using AI tools like ChatGPT for academic assignments can be very frustrating. However, to defend yourself, you must stay composed: know your rights, gather evidence, calmly communicate with professors, and seek support.

Remember, AI detection isn’t definitive evidence of cheating. Assert that a statistical probability prediction by an AI tool isn’t enough to dismiss your work without giving you a chance to defend yourself. If you are innocent, maintain your work’s originality and offer ways to verify its authenticity. Uphold academic integrity, stay calm, and good luck.

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How to write better ChatGPT prompts in 5 steps

ChatGPT is the generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool that's taken the world by storm. While there's always the possibility it will simply make stuff up , there's a lot you can do when crafting prompts to ensure the best possible outcome. That's what we'll be exploring in this how-to.

In this article, we'll show you how to write prompts that encourage the large language model (LLM) that powers  ChatGPT to provide the best possible answers. 

Also: Have 10 hours? IBM will train you in AI fundamentals - for free

Writing effective prompts, known as prompt engineering, has even become its own highly-paid discipline . Who knows? These tips could help you build the skills to become one of those highly paid prompt engineers. Apparently, these gigs can pay from $175,000 to $335,000 per year.  

How to write effective ChatGPT prompts

1. talk to the ai like you would a person.

One of the more interesting things I had to get used to when working with ChatGPT is that you don't program it, you talk to it. As a formally trained programmer, I've had to leave a lot of habits by the wayside when engaging with AI. Talking to it (and with it) requires a mindset shift.

When I say talk to it like a person, I mean talk to it like you would a co-worker or team member. If that's hard to do, give it a name. Alexa is taken, so maybe think of it as "Bob". This naming helps because when you talk to Bob, you might include conversational details, little anecdotes that give your story texture.

Also:   How to use ChatGPT to write code

When talking to a person, it would be natural for them to miss your point initially and require clarification, or veer away from the topic at hand and need to be wrangled back. You might need to fill in the backstory for them, or restate complex questions based on the answers they give you. 

This is called interactive prompting. Don't be afraid to ask multi-step questions: ask, get a response, and based on that response, ask another question. I've done this myself, sometimes 10 or 20 times in a row, and gotten very powerful results. Think of this as having a conversation with ChatGPT.

2. Set the stage and provide context

Writing a ChatGPT prompt is more than just asking a one-sentence question. It often involves providing relevant background information to set the context of the query.

Let's say that you want to prepare for a marathon (for the record, I do not run, dance, or jump -- this is merely an example). You could ask ChatGPT:

How can I prepare for a marathon?

However, you'll get a far more nuanced answer if you add that you're training for your first marathon. Try this instead: 

I am a beginner runner and have never run a marathon before, but I want to complete one in six months. How can I prepare for a marathon?

By giving the AI more information, you're helping it return a more focused answer. Even with ChatGPT's help, there's no way I'm going to run a marathon (unless I'm doing it with a V-Twin motor under my seat). Here are two more examples of questions that provide context:

I am planning to travel to Spain in a few months and would like to learn some basic Spanish to help me communicate with local residents. I am looking for online resources that are suitable for beginners and provide a structured and comprehensive approach to learning the language. Can you recommend some online resources for learning Spanish as a beginner?

In this case, rather than just asking about learning resources, the context helps focus the AI on learning how to communicate on the ground with local residents. Here's another example: 

I am a business owner interested in exploring how blockchain technology can be used to improve supply chain efficiency and transparency. I am looking for a clear and concise explanation of the technology and examples of how it has been used in the context of supply chain management. Can you explain the concept of blockchain technology and its potential applications in supply chain management?

In this example, rather than just asking for information on blockchain and how it works, the focus is specifically on blockchain for supply chain efficiency and how it might be used in a real-world scenario. 

Also:  How to use Image Creator from Microsoft Designer (formerly Bing Image Creator) Lastly, let's get into how to construct a detailed prompt. 

One note: I limit the answer to 500 words because ChatGPT seems to break when asked to produce somewhere between 500 and 700 words, leaving stories mid-sentence and not resuming properly when asked to continue. I hope future versions provide longer answers, because premises like this can generate fun story beginnings: 

Write a short story for me, no more than 500 words. The story takes place in 2339, in Boston. The entire story takes place inside a Victorian-style bookstore that wouldn't be out of place in Diagon Alley. Inside the store are the following characters, all human: The proprietor: make this person interesting and a bit unusual, give them a name and at least one skill or characteristic that influences their backstory and possibly influences the entire short story. The helper: this is a clerk in the store. His name is Todd. The customer and his friend: Two customers came into the store together, Jackson and Ophelia. Jackson is dressed as if he's going to a Steampunk convention, while Ophelia is clearly coming home from her day working in a professional office. Another customer is Evangeline, a regular customer in the store, in her mid-40s. Yet another customer is Archibald, a man who could be anywhere from 40 to 70 years old. He has a mysterious air about himself and seems both somewhat grandiose and secretive. There is something about Archibald that makes the others uncomfortable. A typical concept in retail sales is that there's always more inventory "in the back," where there's a storeroom for additional goods that might not be shown on the shelves where customers browse. The premise of this story is that there is something very unusual about this store's "in the back." Put it all together and tell something compelling and fun.

You can see how the detail provides more for the AI to work with. First, feed "Write me a story about a bookstore" into ChatGPT and see what it gives you. Then feed in the above prompt and you'll see the difference.

3. Tell the AI to assume an identity or profession

One of ChatGPT's coolest features is that it can write from the point of view of a specific person or profession. In a previous article, I showed how you can make ChatGPT write like a pirate or Shakespeare , but you can also have it write like a teacher, a marketing executive, a fiction writer -- anyone you want. 

Also: How ChatGPT can rewrite and improve your existing code  

For example, I can ask ChatGPT to describe the Amazon Echo smart home device, but to do so from the point of view of a product manager, a caregiver, and a journalist in three separate prompts: 

From the point of view of its product manager, describe the Amazon Echo Alexa device. From the point of view of an adult child caring for an elderly parent, describe the Amazon Echo Alexa device. From the point of view of a journalist, describe the Amazon Echo Alexa device.

Try dropping these three prompts into ChatGPT to see its complete response. 

I've pulled a few lines from ChatGPT's responses, so you can see how it interprets different perspectives.  From the product manager identity:  I can confidently say that this is one of the most innovative and revolutionary products in the smart home industry.

From the caregiver identity:  The device's ability to set reminders and alarms can be particularly helpful for elderly individuals who may have trouble remembering to take their medication or attend appointments.

Also:   5 ways to explore the use of generative AI at work

And from the journalist identity:  From a journalistic perspective, the Echo has made headlines due to privacy concerns surrounding the collection and storage of user data.

You can see how different identities allow the AI to provide different perspectives as part of its response. To expand this, you can let the AI do a thought experiment. Let's look at some of the issues that went into the creation of something like Alexa:

The year is 2012. Siri has been out for the iPhone for about a year, but nothing like an Alexa smart home device has been released. The scene is an Amazon board meeting where the Echo smart assistant based on Alexa has just been proposed.  Provide the arguments, pro and con, that board members at that meeting would have been likely to discuss as part of their process of deciding whether or not to approve spending to invest in developing the device.  Feel free to also include participation by engineering design experts and product champions, if that provides more comprehensive perspective.

It's also good to know that making minor changes to your prompts can significantly change ChatGPT's response. For example, when I changed the phrase, "Provide the arguments, pro and con, that..." to "Provide the pro and con arguments as dialogue, that...," ChatGPT rewrote its answer, switching from a list of enumerated pros and cons to an actual dialogue between participants.

4. Keep ChatGPT on track

As mentioned above, ChatGPT has a tendency to go off the rails, lose track of the discussion, or completely fabricate answers. 

There are a few techniques you can use to help keep it on track and honest.

One of my favorite things to do is ask ChatGPT to justify its responses. I'll use phrases like "Why do you think that?" or "What evidence supports your answer?" Often, the AI will simply apologize for making stuff up and come back with a new answer. Other times, it might give you some useful information about its reasoning path. In any case, don't forget to apply the tips I provide for having ChatGPT cite sources .

Also:  My two favorite ChatGPT Plus features and the remarkable things I can do with them

If you have a fairly long conversation with ChatGPT, you'll start to notice that the AI loses the thread. Not that that's unique to AIs -- even in extended conversations with humans, someone is bound to get lost. That said, you can gently guide the AI back on track by reminding it what the topic is, as well as what you're trying to explore.

5. Don't be afraid to play and experiment

One of the best ways to up your skill at this craft is to play around with what the chatbot can do.

Try feeding ChatGPT a variety of interesting prompts to see what it will do with them. Then change them up and see what happens. Here are five to get you started:

• Imagine you are a raindrop falling from the sky during a thunderstorm. Describe your journey from the moment you form in the cloud to the moment you hit the ground. What do you see, feel, and experience?
• You are a toy that has been left behind in an attic for decades. Narrate your feelings, memories of playtimes past, and your hopes of being rediscovered.
• Write the final diary entry of a time traveler who has decided to settle down in a specific era, explaining why they chose that time and what they've learned from their travels.
• Imagine a dialogue between two unlikely objects, like a teacup and a wristwatch, discussing the daily routines and challenges they face.
• Describe a day in an ant colony from the perspective of an ant. Dive deep into the politics, challenges, and social structures of the ant world.

Pay attention not only to what the AI generates, but how it generates what it does, what mistakes it makes, and where it seems to run into limits. All of that detail will help you expand your prompting horizons.

More prompt-writing tips 

• Feel free to re-ask the question. ChatGPT will often change its answer with each ask.
• Make small changes to your prompts to guide it into giving you a better answer.
• ChatGPT will retain its awareness of previous conversations as long as the current page is open. If you leave that page, it will lose awareness. To be clear, ChatGPT will also sometimes lose the thread of the conversation without reason, so be aware you may need to start over from time to time.
• Similarly, opening a new page will start the discussion with fresh responses.
• Be sure to specify the length of the response you want. Answers over about 500 words sometimes break down. 
• You can correct and clarify prompts based on how the AI answered previously. If it's misinterpreting you, you may be able to just tell it what it missed and continue.
• Rephrase questions if ChatGPT doesn't want to answer what you're asking. Use personas to elicit answers that it might not otherwise want to give.
• If you want sources cited , tell it to support or justify its answers.
• ChatGPT custom instructions are now available to free users. You can  give ChatGPT a set of prompts that are always available , so you don't have to retype them.
• Keep experimenting.
• Consider getting the ChatGPT Plus subscription . You can then use your own data for powerful analytics . You can also pull data from the Web . 
• Try asking the same question of Gemini  (formerly Bard) or Copilot (formerly Bing Chat). Both will interpret your prompts differently and answer differently. This is effectively getting a second opinion on your prompt, and can give you alternate perspectives.
• Ask for examples. If you want to see how well ChatGPT understands what you're asking for, ask it "Can you give me three examples of how that works?" or similar questions.
• Ask it to repeat parts of your original requests back to you. For example, if you feed it an article to analyze, you can tell it something like, "Just to be sure you understand, please echo back the first three headlines," or "I want to be sure you understand what I mean, so summarize the main conflict discussed in this article." 
• Sometimes ChatGPT just fails. Keep trying, but also be willing to give up and move on to other tools. It's not perfect...yet.

What type of prompts work best with ChatGPT? 

Part of what makes ChatGPT so compelling is you can ask it almost anything. That said, keep in mind that it's designed to provide written answers. If you want a list of websites, you're better off talking to Google. 

Also:  How to use DALL-E 3 in ChatGPT

If you want some form of computation, talk to Wolfram Alpha . Give ChatGPT open-ended prompts, encourage creativity, and don't be afraid to share personal experiences or emotions. Plus, keep in mind that the AI's knowledge ends in 2021  for ChatGPT 3.5 and December 2023 for ChatGPT 4 in ChatGPT Plus.

How can I adjust the complexity of ChatGPT responses?

You can directly specify the complexity level by including it in your prompt. Add "... at a high school level" or "... at a level intended for a Ph.D. to understand" to the end of your question. You can also increase complexity of output by increasing the richness of your input. The more you provide in your prompt, the more detailed and nuanced ChatGPT's response will be. You can also include other specific instructions, like "Give me a summary," "Explain in detail," or "Provide a technical description."

Also:  How does ChatGPT actually work?

You can also pre-define profiles. For example, you could say "When evaluating something for a manager, assume an individual with a four-year business college education, a lack of detailed technical understanding, and a fairly limited attention span, who likes to get answers that are clear and concise. When evaluating something for a programmer, assume considerable technical knowledge, an enjoyment of geek and science fiction references, and a desire for a complete answer. Accuracy is deeply important to programmers, so double-check your work."

If you ask ChatGPT to "explain C++ to a manager" and "explain C++ to a programmer," you'll see how the responses differ.

What do I do if ChatGPT refuses to answer or I don't like its answer? 

There are some guardrails built into ChatGPT. It tends to shut down if you ask it political questions, for example. That's what's built into the system. While you might be able to tease out an answer, it's probably not going to provide great value. That said, feel free to keep trying with different phrasing or perspectives. 

You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to subscribe to my weekly update newsletter on Substack , and follow me on Twitter at @DavidGewirtz , on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz , on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz , and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV .

More on AI tools

Google releases two new free resources to help you optimize your ai prompts, how to use chatgpt, how to get started with meta ai in facebook, instagram, and more.