Table of Contents
You’ve probably encountered AI-generated content before. From emails to social media posts and even websites, AI bots are becoming increasingly proficient at mimicking human writing. Spotting AI-generated text, however, is not always a walk in the park. With the rise of AI chatbots like ChatGPT spreading misinformation, it’s essential to have reliable AI content detectors at our disposal. But which ones are the most effective? Let’s find out.
The Art of Detecting AI-Generated Text
AI writing generators utilize various techniques to achieve human-level fluency. As AI technology advances, these tools become better at concealing their patterns and errors. While no single tool can spot synthetic text with flawless accuracy, some come close.
AI content detectors are designed to identify common indicators of AI-generated text. They analyze text from popular AI text generators like ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Jasper. Some detectors are tailored to specific use cases, such as college essays.
To use these detectors, simply copy and paste the text or upload a document. Some platforms may require account creation. Additionally, you can adjust filters to refine your search.
For this article, I tested three popular AI content detectors: GPTZero, OpenAI AI Text Classifier, and Copyleaks AI Content Detector. Using various text samples, including AI-generated content, I evaluated their performance.
GPTZero: The Perplexity and Burstiness Detector
GPTZero primarily caters to professors aiming to identify students seeking help from ChatGPT on their essays. It assesses text excerpts based on two parameters: perplexity and burstiness.
Perplexity measures the complexity of the text. If GPTZero finds the text perplexing, it’s more likely to be human-written. However, if it detects familiarity, indicating reliance on the same data GPTZero was trained on, it’s likely AI-generated.
Burstiness evaluates sentence variations. AI bots tend to stitch together sentences of predictable uniform length, while humans exhibit greater variations.
Although GPTZero can review up to 5,000 characters and extract text from uploaded documents, its performance in my tests was inconsistent. While it correctly identified human-written content, it struggled with AI-generated text. It labeled AI-generated content as “likely to be written entirely by a human” despite its dull tone. However, it successfully detected the repetitive rhythm and superlatives in ChatGPT’s text.
OpenAI AI Text Classifier: The Confidence-based Detector
AI Text Classifier, another tool by OpenAI, underwent extensive training on a vast corpus of both human-written and machine-generated text. Given a minimum of 1,000 characters, it rates excerpts as “very unlikely,” “unlikely,” “unclear,” “possibly,” or “likely” to be AI-generated.
Unfortunately, in my tests, AI Text Classifier struggled to identify AI-generated text accurately. It labeled all my human writing as “very unlikely AI-generated” but failed to spot ChatGPT’s work. Its linear approach relies solely on learned patterns from human-written content, making it less effective than other detectors.
Copyleaks AI Content Detector: The Accurate Plagiarism Checker
With a decade-long reputation in plagiarism detection, Copyleaks offers an AI Content Detector powered by years of experience and user feedback. It boasts an impressive 99.1% accuracy and supports multiple languages.
In my tests, Copyleaks lived up to its reputation. It accurately flagged both human and AI-generated text. Unlike other detectors, it provided conclusive answers without ambiguity. It even assigned precise probabilities to sentences and paragraphs, distinguishing between human and machine authorship with a 99% probability.
Choose the Best AI Content Detector
While my sample size was limited, it was evident that Copyleaks outperformed the competition. Its accuracy and clarity made it the top AI content detector in my tests. So, the next time you’re uncertain if an email was written by a robot, turn to Ratingperson and use Copyleaks to get the confirmation you need.
Related reading:
- 8 ways real businesses are using AI for content creation
- 6 ways to make your content stand out in the AI writing wave
- What is AI?: A human guide to artificial intelligence