It’s easy to spot when something was written by artificial intelligence, isn’t it? The text is so generically bland. Even if it seems superficially impressive it lacks edge. Plus there are the obvious tells — the em dashes, the “rule of three” examples and the constant use of words like “delve” and “underscore”. The writing, as one machine learning researcher put it, is “mid”.
Yet every single one of these apparently obvious giveaways can be applied to human writing. Three consecutive examples are a common formulation in storytelling. Words like “underscore” are used in professional settings to add emphasis. Journalists really love em dashes. None of it is unique to AI.
Read the “how to spot undisclosed AI” guides from the likes of Wikipedia and you’ll receive a lot of contradictory advice. Both repetition and variation are supposed to be indicators. Even AI detection tool providers acknowledge that, because AI models are evolving and “human writing varies widely”, they cannot guarantee accuracy. Not that this has stopped a cottage industry of online “experts” declaring that they can just tell when something apparently written by a person was really generated by AI.