How Do AI Detectors Work? Essential Things You Must Know!

AI content is haunting bloggers; numerous websites have been hit this year, and we don’t know what the future unfolds. Due to this, now everyone’s using AI detectors to find out who has written the content to protect their blogs.

I manage a team of writers to write the content for my niche blogs. I always want to publish helpful human-written articles for my blog audience. Hence, I have researched to answer the question: How do AI detectors work?

If you asked me, I don’t recommend relying solely on the AI content detector tools; there are solid reasons for it. To understand the reasons, you must learn about the science behind AI detects. Don’t worry; it’s not a complex topic!

To make things easier, I’ll explain everything with digestible concepts. So don’t wait any longer; read this guide until the end and learn the facts about AI text detectors. At the end of the article, I’ll suggest the best AI detector for WordPress that I use.

Why Is AI Text Detection Even Important?

The first question that rings the bell is why AI text detection is even essential. The truth is it’s not as important as you might consider it. People (primarily bloggers) use these AI detectors because they think AI content is worthless.

Besides being worthless, there’s another misconception that Google doesn’t accept AI content and even hits sites with new algorithm updates. The fact is, all of this is just a “MISCONCEPTION” nothing beyond it.

Yes, AI content can be worthless if you don’t fact-check, edit, and give it a human touch. If your content is 100% factually correct, with the best information, it doesn’t matter whether AI or a human writes it.

Google wants helpful content that can help the people who wrote it doesn’t matter. The proof is that Google officially accepted AI content in February 2023. There’s also a recent change in one of the Google guidelines about “Helpful Content.”

Before the update, this was the intro paragraph of the article:

After the update, it has been changed to this:

Is It Important To Check Content With AI Detectors?

So, since Google has officially recognized AI content, is there a need for AI detectors? Yes, AI detectors are essential even now, especially if you outsource the blog writing work to content writers.

This is because Google only accepts AI content if it’s helpful and well-researched. And no matter how famous an AI program is, it can’t write this content without human involvement. Here’s the reason why:

I asked ChatGPT what AI detectors can do, and it gave me factless content. These tools don’t check for keyword optimization, plagiarism, or accuracy of information. If you use this content without editing, your website will be hit by the next Google Update.

Using an AI detector tool to determine how much content AI writes is better. Then, check the overall relevance of the information. If your content is helpful and can provide value to users, post it; otherwise, it’s best to keep the file in the “trash bin.”

How Are AI Content Detectors Made?

If you’ve decided to use AI detectors, it’s best to know how they’re made to understand the accuracy. These tools are language models like ChatGPT (ChatGPT is trained with data about almost every subject to understand and produce content).

However, unlike AI models like ChatGPT, which are designed to generate content, AI detectors are fine-tuned to make educated guesses. All these resources are trained to identify whether the content is human-written, AI-generated, or a mix of both.

How Do AI Detectors Identify AI Content?

Now, the question is, how do AI detectors identify AI content? Behind every AI, there’s an algorithm and the data used to train the language model. To understand the outcome, you must know about both of these.

• Algorithm: An algorithm is the programming of an AI model that tells how it should work according to the set of rules and patterns.
• Data: The data is a massive collection of text from the internet that gives the info to the program and is used to train it. This data helps the detecting tool understand how humans write, and other AI models generate text.

According to Algorithms and data, almost all AI detectors search for perplexity and burstiness. These two are essential factors; if your content is low-perplexity and low-burstiness, it will likely be AI-generated.

Perplexity

The dictionary meaning of perplexity is “confusing or complex,” and AI checks both points. AI detectors analyze the entire content, like how confusing, unique, and complex the generated content is.

If the text wording is complex, creative, and confusing, it’s not written by an AI tool. It’s because AI language models are designed to follow a structured and predictable pattern to write content straightforwardly and simply.

The type of content AI writes is simple, straightforward, with predictable patterns and is called low-perplexity text. In contrast, humans write more creatively and unpredictably, which is called high-perplexity text.

Burstiness

Burstiness is another factor AI detectors analyze in the content. It is simply the identification of variations and uniqueness of the sentences. As I said, AI language models like ChatGPT and Jasper are trained to write in a specific pattern, and burstiness is all about it.

AI detectors check how unique and unpredictable your sentence pattern is compared to AI, which mostly writes longer sentences. In addition, you’ll find similar words in the AI content, while humans don’t use the exact words more than two to three times.

If your content sentences are predictable, longer, with the same wording and slight variation, the AI detection tool will consider it low-burstiness. And low-burstiness means your content is written by an AI tool.

Are AI Detectors 100% Accurate?

AI text detectors aren’t 100% accurate; I don’t consider them about 80% to 90% accurate. They make educated guesses by using their ability to predict text sequences. If it’s predictable, your content will be marked as AI content.

Here’s an example: I asked ChatGPT what perplexity is and defined perplexity in AI content in 50 words. You can check the answers in the image below; the wording and writing patterns are the same. This type of content is low-perplexity (straightforward) and low-burstiness (same way).

If you rewrite this content in your wording with variations and creativity, AI content detectors can’t identify it. Here’s an example: I rewrote the answers ChatGPT provided in the image above with more invention, and boom, it’s not AI content.

Results: 

Only the first two paragraphs are flagged as AI content written by the ChatGPT 3.5 version. However, according to the AI detector, the third paragraph is human-written, which is true. But the point to notice is the third paragraph is just a more creative version of AI text.

Best Free & Paid Tools To Detect AI Content

There are many tools to detect AI content (mentioned below); some are paid, and many are free. It’s up to you which one you want to choose, but I suggest you use the paid tools for the best accuracy.

• Originality AI (Paid): Known for its robust plagiarism detection and AI content analysis.
• Winston AI (Paid): Offers AI content analysis with different subscription packages.
• ZeroGPT (Free): A reliable AI detector and word count tool for professionals.
• Copyleaks (Free): Provides free AI detection with features like API and LMS integration.
• Content Scale (Free): Offers AI detection service and can rewrite the content.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How do we avoid AI detection?

The best way to avoid AI content detection is to understand how AI tools write and the pattern they follow. After that, try to avoid following the same pattern when writing, and choose words and sentence structures that make content high-perplexity and burstiness to prevent detection AI.

How do you paraphrase to avoid AI detection?

By following these tips, you can quickly paraphrase the content without AI detection.

• Utilize unique words: When paraphrasing, choose synonyms or alternative words for the original terms in your content.
• Minimize word repetition: Avoid using the same words too frequently, as it can make your content appear less varied and more likely to be detected by AI.
• Diversify sentence structures: Vary the way sentences are structured. This enhances readability and makes it harder for AI to identify the content.
• Concise sentences: Write brief sentences that convey your message. Long, complex sentences are considered written by AI.
• Manual content editing and human touch: After paraphrasing, go through the content manually and give your content a human touch.

Is it possible for AI detectors to be wrong?

Yes, there’s a high possibility that AI detectors can be wrong. AI text detectors only guess whether AI tools write the content by analyzing the predictability of the words and sentences.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you’ve got the answer to your question: how AI content detectors work. The AI detector tools don’t matter much if the content is relevant and useful. Google only wants “value”; it doesn’t matter who wrote the valuable content.

So, I suggest focusing more on the content’s facts and usefulness rather than worrying about who wrote it. And if you still want to use an AI tool, always go for Originality AI; it’s the best one among all the tools available online to check your content for the WordPress site.