Real or Fake? How to Detect AI-Generated Content [2024]

With AI on the rise in digital content marketing, you must know how to detect AI-generated content. Can you tell if a human wrote something or if AI wrote it?

Bloggers and content writers use AI writing software, and that’s okay, but how can you be sure they still put in the human effort to check and edit what the machines wrote? You can, and that’s what we will uncover in this post.

This guide will show you how to spot AI-written content and avoid being duped by AI machines or lazy content writers.

By the end, you’ll be armed to the teeth with AI detection tools and strategies to outsmart the machines and spot AI-written content. 

AI is on the move – Artificial Intelligence is set to grow by an impressive 37.3% every year from 2023 to 2030…

Forbes.com

What is AI Detection?

AI detection is the ability to spot whether a human or a machine wrote a text, an image, or a video. 

Writing complete articles in seconds using a Large Language Model (LLM) like ChatGPT or Writesonic is easy. 

However, what about plagiarism– is AI-generated text fake content, or can we trust that it’s accurate?🤔

AI detection helps ensure your content is original, trustworthy, free from plagiarism, and has been written by a human.  

How To Detect AI-Generated Text

Now that you know what AI detection let’s dive into practical ways to spot AI content, starting with AI-generated text.

1. Use AI Content Detection Tools

There are many AI content detection tools that help you sniff out AI-written text and give your writing a human score.

Knowing which one to use can be a bit hit and miss, even giving you a false positive result. Luckily for you, I’ve shortlisted the most accurate ones, so let’s review some of the best AI detectors available today.

Originality: AI Detector Tool

Originality is one of the best defenses against AI-generated text that claims to detect AI content with 99% accuracy.

It’s excellent at distinguishing human writing from AI-generated text, ensuring your work is accurate, and building trust with the audience. 

Originality’s features include;

Is Originality a good AI detection tool? Absolutely! Originality is a reliable AI detection tool that distinguishes human writing from machine-created text and highlights any fake content. 

What’s not to like? You’re making sure your content resonates, informs, and builds trust.

GPTZero

Another popular AI detector is GPTZero. This AI content detection tool can analyze text against popular AI models, including ChatGPT GPT3,4, and Bard. 

The beauty of GPTZero is that it’s so simple to use. To scan your text, paste (1) or upload a file (2). Accept the T&Cs (3), and click the “Get Results” button (4). 

The AI detector will do its magic and give you an easy-to-understand result; for example – “Your text is likely to be written entirely by a human” or “Your text may include parts written by AI“.

GPTZero also has a Google Chrome extension so that you can detect AI-generated content directly from your browser. On top of that, it’s a free service to use for the first 5000 characters.

Content At Scale

If you’re a serious content marketer, then you’ve probably heard of Content At Scale– the all-powerful AI writing tool that can craft 2000+ word articles in minutes. 

You might not know it’s also an excellent AI detection tool. 

Using Natural Language Processing patterns, Content At Scale can accurately detect if language models such as Bard or ChatGPT were used to write an article. 

The benefit of using Content At Scale is that you are, in effect, hitting two birds with one stone — instantly writing high-quality content and secondly creating machine-generated text content that is undetectable by AI content detectors that looks and sounds like human-written content.

2. Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is when you use the same word or phrase over and over in an article. It’s a bad SEO practice and gives the reader a poor experience. 

People use prompts to generate AI output, often including keywords. These same keywords get repeated throughout the text, which strongly signals that the text wasn’t human-written but AI-generated.

In this ChatGPT text, notice how often the phrase “free marketing tools” was used;

3. Repetition and Patterns – Spot the Bot!

Sometimes, I repeat the same words or phrases when I’m not sure how else to say something. AI tools do the same. The AI generator often writes similar sentences because it’s unsure of the subject or context.

For example, in this ChatGPT paragraph;

It uses the term’ compelling content‘ three times in the same paragraph. Repeated terms are a tell-tale sign of AI written text. A human would know to mix things up and use different synonyms. 

Other common AI phrases are; 

• Plus

• However

• Moreover

• Hence

Obviously, these are just some of the common phrases. However, with practice, you will better detect when terms are used repeatedly and don’t fit naturally in the text.

4. Plagiarism Test – Catch AI Red-Handed

Generative AI apps work by sifting through training data scraped from other websites across the internet. They use the data to learn how to write human-generated text when prompted for information. 

The problem is that ‘scrapping’ is like ‘copying’. So, you can detect if AI wrote a piece of text by running it through a plagiarism detection tool, like Grammarly. 

5. Personal Touch – Humanizing Factor

I had this history teacher once. He would put the entire class to sleep with his dry, monotonous voice. He could have been the first prototype for AI writing 😆. 

And you know what? AI-generated text can sound just like that —robotic, cold, emotionless, and having this generic tone. 

AI-generated text often lacks personal experiences, funny stories, or real-life examples that make the content relatable. Being a non-human writer makes it challenging for AI to simulate real-life experiences.

6. Writing Style – Flat Tones

AI models have made great strides but still need help maintaining a consistent style and tone in their writing. 

We all have unique writing styles that are as personal as our own voice. Formal when needed and switching to informal at other times, for example. However, AI language model writing is often ‘flat’, a single monotone delivery of the facts. 

It’s not a very sophisticated way to detect AI content, but robotic writing usually means it’s AI content.

In this example, we asked ChatGPT to explain How to Make Passive Income…. here’s what it gave us.

There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with its answer, but notice how it doesn’t have a personality or depth. It’s as though it went to its training data archive and spat out everything it had stored on ‘how to make passive income’. 

Okay, now you know how to detect AI writing using AI content detection tools and a keen eye. But what about AI detection for images? 

How To Detect AI-Generated Images

You’ve probably seen realistic images generated by computers and wondered, ‘How will we ever know anything is real anymore?‘. Yup, I’ve thought that, too, at times. 

Look at how much AI-generated art has evolved in just 1 year! 🤯

1. Strange Objects – When AI Gets TOO Creative

Have you ever looked at an image and thought something was slightly off? Sometimes, when AI tools generate images, they get stuck and fill the blanks with pixels.  

When it comes to images, our eyes are the best AI content detection and generation tools. Remember this AI image of the Pope styling in a Balenciaga jacket? If you look closely at the details, you can see it’s not human-generated but imagined by an AI tool.

You can see it clearly with text in an image. Generative AI tools find it hard to replicate text in the background of pictures because of the very structured nature of text. 

Examining the hands, teeth, and eyes is another way to detect AI-generated images. Look at this image generated by artificial intelligence; what’s wrong with it?

2. AI Image Detectors – The AI’s Bane

Another consequence of the generative AI boom is the rise of AI detection tools to detect what AI makes. AI or Not is a content detection tool that detects whether a human or a machine created an image.

AI or Not, can sniff out images created by Dall-E, Midjourney, GAN, and several other models. The free version will allow you to upload and scan single photos, and the paid versions offer bulk scanning.

3. Look for Watermarks

Many AI image-generating applications use watermarks so everyone knows the image is AI content, not human-generated. 

Take DALL-E, for example; they place 5 colored squares at the bottom right-hand corner of every image generated using their AI app. It’s not glaringly obvious, but it’s one way of detecting AI-generated images.

Is AI Content Detection Important?

AI content detection is vital for content marketers because readers want to know your content is accurate and genuine.

As a blog owner, you want to ensure that freelancers write the content themselves rather than relying on machines to generate entire articles without fact-checking. 

As a writer, you aim to engage readers and keep them interested. But, AI writing tools can make it hard for your audience to relate to you and drive them away from your site.

Writing complete articles in seconds using a Large Language Model (LLM) like ChatGPT or Writesonic is easy.

AI tools can help you create more content, but depending too much on AI can result in low-quality, spammy content, leading to low engagement. 

Low engagement signals to Google that your content isn’t good — which is terrible news for your Google ranking. 

In a nutshell, AI content detection is essential because;

Why Human Content Beats AI

Robots definitely make content writing more fun and save writers loads of time. But let’s be honest, more content faster doesn’t necessarily mean “better” content. Human-written content is still superior to AI-generated content for a bunch of reasons:

Final Thoughts About Detecting AI-Generated Content

In today’s fast-evolving digital landscape, distinguishing between human-generated and AI-generated content is more crucial than ever. 

Identifying AI-generated text and images involves observation, such as looking for strange objects and distortions in pictures, particularly in hands, feet, teeth, and hair. We also armed you with AI detectors such as Originality and AI or Not that can detect AI content with laser accuracy. 

AI tools aren’t the enemy, but they’re not our replacement. They can help content writers save time and money when used responsibly and in moderation. However, human-written articles are better quality, more relatable, and rank higher in Google SERPs.

It’s over to you now. Go into the digital world with the confidence that you can detect AI-generated images and text without being fooled by the machines. 

Please share this information with your friends and help them become savvy at detecting AI-generated content.