Detecting AI

How to spot AI-generated content?

This blog is using AI to reduce spelling mistakes.

However, if AI saves time, it can quickly turn into plagiarism, even with the best intentions.

Free online detectors

• Zero GPT
• Hugging face

This is quite often restricted by text length or subject to various quotas.

Nevertheless, it is usually enough to catch pushy users.

Suspicious characters

Be careful, the following list is not 100% reliable because some authors use some chars for valid reasons.

Although, these characters are more or less typical of AI-generated texts:

• reversed apostrophes (or “backticks” in English) while there’s no code snippets
• ’ instead of ': the curved typographic apostrophe
• «  » instead of " ": French quotes with non-breaking space
• “ and ”: curved English quotation marks
• —: em dash
• ¹, ², ³: superscripts used for footnotes

Generalized plagiarism?

Most AIs do not provide their sources. So we may end up with entire sections copied from here and there without even knowing it.

The question of intellectual property arises because this information does not appear ex nihilo.

Some author(s) really had to struggle to produce an intelligible and sounding text before it landed in a book or on a web page.

However, human authors themselves were nourished by other readings and various influences before arriving at the final version.

Nevertheless, for humans, it takes a crazy amount of time, it is less scalable, and for now, it is clearly more sophisticated and creative.

All this to say that if you can, favor AIs that provide their sources, inspect the links in question to see if they are consistent with the author’s thinking, and do not hesitate to rephrase it, as long as you cite the URL.