What is an AI Detector? Benefits, Technology and Reliability
Editor / January 22, 2025
An AI detector or AI content detector is a tool that detects if AI content generators like ChatGPT generated the content.
Makers of these tools, of course, praise the reliability of their products at the top of their voice. But how reliable are these tools?
In this FastLinky blog post, I will give you an overview of how these AI detectors work and how reliable they are.
Some Relevant Technical Terms and Their Meanings
| AI Detector (also known as AI Content Detector) | A tool that detects if the content is written by human or machine-generated content. |
| AI Content Generator | AI content generators are software that uses AI to generate content like articles, blog posts, social media posts etc. |
| Classifier | A classifier is an AI algorithm that orders an AI detector to categorise and classify data based on certain features is called a classifier. |
| Perplexity | An AI detection metric where the AI detector determines how likely a word is to perplex the readers. A low perplexity makes the detector decide that the content is AI-generated. |
| Burstiness | An AI detection metric where the AI detector determines how varied the sentence structures are in a write-up. It marks sentences with low burstiness as AI-generated. |
| Training Data | Data fed to an AI system to train it to analyse, predict, make decisions and recognise patterns are called training data. |
| AI (Artificial Intelligence) | AI is the use of technology to make machines and computers that can mimic the cognitive intelligence of human beings. |
| Machine Learning | Machine learning is the process by which a computer analyses and understands to improve its AI efficiency. |
| Plagiarism | An unethical practice to palm off others’ work as one’s own without giving the original creators any credit. |
| UGC (User Generated Content) | Content created by users, like comments on social media posts etc. |
What is an AI Detector?
AI detectors are a type of software that detects if a written composition was generated by using artificial intelligence technology.
An AI detector can analyse text, videos or images to determine the source of their origin. These tools may play an important role where human intelligence and expertise are preferable to machine-generated content.
For example, a teacher can detect if a student has written his assignment himself or used an AI content generator to do it.
Or, search engine algorithms can find out if the content was generated by human beings or machines.
The Context and Application of an AI Detector
Before we delve into the benefits of an AI detector, let’s clarify our understanding of the context of these detection tools.
AI Content Generators
AI content generators are software that generate content like text, images or videos. Using the technology of machine learning, these tools analyse huge amounts of data and create content based on keywords.
Interestingly, one question may baffle even the greatest minds. That is, if we needed AI detectors why had we invented AI content generators in the first place?
Why Do We Need AI Content Generators?
These tools can help where speed and accuracy are preferable to creativity. For example, they can produce huge amounts of content in an unbelievably short time.
This may be necessary for businesses that are required to create, develop and update the content on their websites quickly and regularly.
Then again, this AI technology makes this method of content generation much cheaper than hiring multiple employees to write content.
Besides, An AI content generator can make keyword-rich content for search engine optimisation and help businesses rank high in search results.
Drawbacks of AI Content Generators
This AI content generation has several issues. Here are some key limitations of this system of content generation that necessitated the invention of an AI detector.
1. Limited Creativity: AI content generators use existing data to generate ideas and content. They lack the creative impulses that fire the imagination and inspire novel ideas and writing.
Google in its latest update on its content writing guidelines clearly said that it would give preference to original relevant creative content that provides a great user experience.
Only a human being with lots of creative juice can accomplish it. In this context, an AI content generator becomes a useless, even dangerous, tool to use.
2. Need for Human Control: AI content generators need to be controlled and used by human beings.
3. Can Spread Disinformation: Unethical people may and do spread false or twisted information deliberately to mislead or manipulate others for financial or other gains.
4. Can Harm Students: Students may use AI content generators to write essays or dissertations, which is not allowed and which may severely harm their cognitive development.
5. Facilitates Spamming: Spammers use AI generators to create and spread spammy content online.
Benefits of an AI Detector
The wholesale use of AI detectors will make one wonder why AI content generators were ever invented.
You’ll hardly find a business or educational institution where employees and students aren’t threatened with dire consequences should they use AI content generators.
Here is a list of key benefits an AI detector yields.
It Ensures Originality
Allowing the detection of AI-generated content, AI detectors act like facilitators of unique original content.
Better Spam Detection
Techno-savvy spammers are now using AI generators to spam others. AI detectors provide an efficient tool that detects spammy content for a better user experience.
Maintains Academic Integrity
AI detectors help detect plagiarism and ensure academic integrity by discouraging students from using machines for their writing assignments.
Curb the Spread of Misinformation
A single misinformation can trigger a major crisis, spread hate, trigger riots and other dangerous social unrest.
An efficient AI detection tool can drastically reduce this unethical practice of spreading rumours and misinformation by alerting against possible randomly generated content.
Improves UGC Quality
An AI detector can help a social media platform detect machine-generated content and improve the quality of its UGC.
Helps Publishing Industry
Publishers use AI detection software to ensure the publication of original write-ups with a view to avoiding any legal hassles arising out of copyright disputes.
How AI Detectors Work
Amazingly, AI detectors seem to know that human brains are much more complex than their algorithms.
So, they take complex words and sentences as human-written and easy and predictable ones as machine-generated.
The system works like this:
AI detectors compare the structure, diction and style of a written piece with its huge database of human and AI-generated content to find the similarity of the composition to AI-generated content.
While scanning content, AI detectors focus on two things: perplexity and burstiness.
The Role of Classifier in AI Detector
AI detectors use classifiers to detect similar patterns in content. A classifier can identify words and sentence structures used by humans and machines.
Comparing words and sentences in a content with data fet to AI detectors, classifiers can identify patterns typical of human beings and machines and give out a detection result based on that comparison.
Role of Perplexity in AI Detection
AI content generators compare millions of content and try to give out an easily understandable copy with commonly used words. In short, words with low perplexity.
Now, if an AI detector finds a copy dense with low perplexity words, it usually marks it as an AI-generated copy.
Role of Burstiness in AI Detection
Burstiness refers to perplexity on the sentence level.
Like words, AI content generators compare a content’s sentences with millions of sentence structures in their datasets to give out easily understandable sentences.
An AI detector analyses a sentence to predict the next sentence. If it can easily predict the next sentence, it marks the sentence as AI-generated.
Now if AI detectors find a copy replete with such easy and commonplace sentences, they will usually mark it as AI-generated.
How Reliable are AI Detectors?
As of now, not at all reliable.
My personal experience is they are maddeningly unreliable tools with a sky-high rate of false positives.
Some Key reasons for their unreliability are listed below.
High False Positives Rate
A good writer always varies his diction, sentence structures and style to make his composition effective. He uses both simple and complex sentence structures and diction.
But if an AI detector finds simple predictable words and sentences, it immediately marks them as AI-generated, resulting in erroneous detection with a high rate of false positives.
You Can Easily Befool Them
A 2023 study put 14 popular AI detectors, like Turnitin and GPTZero, under the microscope to find out their efficacy.
The lead researcher Debora Weber-Wulff said clearly that these so-called AI detectors just don’t work at all.
These tools are like babes in the woods. Here is how you can befool them in your sleep.
- Generate a copy using an AI content generator.
- Make some slight changes in the content.
- Use a paraphrasing tool to paraphrase the content. Congratulations! You’ve just taken the mickey out of a top-selling upmarket AI detector.
Limited Training Data
The training data may not be sufficient to analyse a diverse range of writing styles and the use of words and sentences. This is a major weakness that often extracts false positives from AI detectors.
Evil Consequences of AI Detectors
AI detectors are not only worthless but a dangerous tool to determine integrity.
A false positive result, which AI detectors seem to specialise in, can have far-reaching and dangerous fallouts.
Suppose a teacher uses an AI detector that wrongly accuses a student of submitting an AI-generated essay.
This may ruin the academic career of that student and cause enormous depression and stress in him.
How to Get the Most Out of AI Detectors
The sorry fact is that businesses, educators and everybody else are using AI detectors on blind faith. This is, of course, an irresponsible and stupid method of telling the unique from the fake.
Your best bet seems to be using an AI detector along with a good plagiarism checker. A plagiarism checker compares texts with the existing database of content.
It can also detect attempts to evade detection like synonym substitution etc.
But you must remember, both of them can be wrong and give out false positives. Nothing can beat human review and verification.
Present Indefinite, Future Tense
If the present AI detection landscape is gloomy, the future state of this affair seems even bleaker.
The top AI content generators like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini will get more and more sophisticated over time and the real-fake divide will get even more indefinable.
A time may come when an AI detector will flag you as a thief on the basis of words and sentences you wrote a couple of months back yourself.
Conclusion
Though AI detectors are beloved tools for businesses and educators, their efficacy is doubtful. The problem lies in the very technology that makes them tick.
Too much dependence on probability and training data makes these tools unreliable and at times dangerous.
A false positive can ruin the academic and professional careers of honest students and employees.
Using an AI detector along with a plagiarism checker may help but not much. One should be very careful while making decisions based on AI detectors’ judgements.
FAQ.
Q. What is an AI detector?
A. An AI detector is software used to detect content generated by AI content generators.
Q. Are AI detectors accurate?
A. Far from it. All AI detectors are dangerously unreliable.
Q. What is a false positive?
A. When a tool like an AI detector wrongly identifies a unique content as AI-generated, it is called a false positive outcome.
Q. How do AI detectors work?
A. They compare content with training data to identify AI-generated words and sentences.