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How to Tell if Something Was Written by AI

When an article sounds too good, suspect AI.  Here are some things to watch out for.

Common AI Writing Tells

AI overuses em dashes —

"AI uses quotation marks for emphasis".

AI doesn't misused words. or make typos or grammatical errors.

AI uses phrases like "It wasn’t just X. It was Y."

AI writes perfectly even paragraphs with the same length, cadence, and structure.

AI doesn't misused words. or make typos or grammatical errors.

AI uses synonyms to make repetition look new, like using "important", "significant', and "meaningful" to hide that it is saying the same thing over and over.

You can swap sections around or delete paragraphs without changing the overall meaning.

Instead of just telling you what happened, AI keeps suggesting how you should feel about it.

AI remains non-committal with phrases like "On the One Hand…" and "Others suggest..."

AI uses big words to try to sound authoritative or "deep".

AI doesn't follow the standard essay format. articles circle around and make the same point several times.

AI is impersonal.  It usually doesn't use regional expressions. It keeps the same flat emotional tone throughout the article.

AI tends to structure paragraphs, to refer back to the article, and to say too soon why something matters.

AI "hallucinates" so always check the references.

AI doesn't like to leave things open-ended. The ending tends to gather any loose ends, but not to synthesize or come up with a hard conclusion. 

Summary

AI doesn't actually say anything new.  It says the same thing, it just leans into what it already said. It has to "speak" from the sources it's trained on. Its purpose is often to get the reader emotionally caught up in it.

If after reading this post you have learned to suspect articles are AI, you're probably right. 

Is it wrong to use AI?

It's not completely wrong to use AI, because AI can use dozens of sources to research an article in a short time. AI writing is as detectable as plagiarism.

AI is putting human writers out of work and we should remember it's expanding into other fields, like law, movie scripts, medical research, and software.

In this writer's opinion, AI is better used to gather facts, not to write the actual articles.

Resources

There are a number of free sites that can detect AI but none of them is foolproof. 

https://gptzero.me/  offers limited free tests.
https://quillbot.com/ai-content-detector also has a free tier
https://www.grammarly.com/ai-detector free 

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