AI technology is becoming more ingrained in our lives with each passing day. There are a lot of great things about it, but it has also created some concerns.
A growing number of people are using AI detection tools to mitigate some of the issues caused by AI. But Are AI Detectors accurate?
What Are AI Detection Tools?
An AI detector is a software program that is trained on thousands of data sets of content to distinguish between content created by humans and that made with AI. These programs take a variety of factors into consideration to make these conclusions:
- They look for variations in the length of sentences. Content made with generative AI tends to have similar sentence lengths, while content written by humans tends to vary a lot more.
- They look for words that are commonly used in content written with generative AI tools. This includes words like “delve”, “elevate” and “leverage.” Content that uses these words repetitively is a lot more likely to be flagged by AI.
- They see if content tends to have original ideas. Most content created by AI tends to use similar arguments, so it is a lot more likely to be flagged for being generated with AI.
- Content made with AI rarely makes spelling or grammatical errors. Therefore, content without any errors is more likely to be identified as being made with AI.
- Content made with generative AI tends to have words that start with the same letter in close proximity to each other. This is another potential red flag that the content was AI-generated.
They look at all of these factors to draw conclusions as to whether or not content was made with AI.
What Are Some Applications of AI Detection Tools?
There are a variety of reasons people use AI detection tools. Some of them include the following:
- A number of educators are using AI detectors to tell if students used AI to cheat on their assignments. Surveys have found that around 60-70% of high school students admit to cheating. Although this figure has remained steady over the years, a growing number of students are doing so with AI instead of committing plagiarism or asking someone else to do their homework for them. Cheating with AI can be harder to detect, but teachers are using these detectors to catch it.
- Many online publishers are using AI detectors to tell whether their writers are using generative AI to create content. This is a great way to help them make sure they are getting their money’s worth by paying writers that are actually thinking about what they are writing.
- Scientific publishers are also using AI detectors to make sure that studies are not being falsified.
- Some cybersecurity professionals are using AI to identify deepfakes and email phishing schemes that are created with AI.
There are a lot of reasons AI detectors are going to be more popular as unscrupulous actors use AI in new ways.
How Effective Are AI Detectors?
Many people are still skeptical that these tools actually work. However, research so far shows that AI detectors seem to be pretty good at telling if content was made with AI or not.
The quality of AI detectors varies, because some tools are better than others. However, one major publisher reports that at least three AI detectors were able to successfully detect AI content every single time.
We ran our own test a while back and found that one major AI detector was able to successfully identify AI detected content in four of the six articles that we scanned. However, it is important to note that one of the articles that it missed was written with a more primitive AI model back in 2020, a couple of years before the most popular generative AI models were released. It probably had a much different syntax than more recent AI models.
Also, this AI detector that we ran our own experiment with wasn’t one of the three that was referenced as being one of the best by that other author. Therefore, it is understandable that it would have a lower accuracy rate.
Overall, AI detectors appear to be pretty accurate. Since they rely on machine learning technology, they are going to keep getting better as they are scanned on more content. This is going to be a good thing for people who rely on them.
AI Detection Technology is Going to Be Important for Weeding Out Plagiarism and Bad Actors
There are a lot of benefits of using AI detection software. More people are likely to use these programs in the future to stop cheating in academia, plagiarism, phishing and other problems. They are going to be necessary as AI becomes more ingrained in our lives.
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