How to Tell If Text Is AI-Generated

A handful of patterns show up disproportionately often in AI-written text: unusually even sentence lengths, a tendency toward generic transitions ('In conclusion,' 'It is important to note'), a lack of specific, checkable detail, and a certain smoothness that avoids the small inconsistencies real writers leave behind.

None of these are proof on their own. Careful human writers can produce very polished, even prose, and AI output has gotten better at varying its rhythm. Tells are a starting point for suspicion, not a conclusion.

Human readers are prone to both false positives (flagging distinctive but genuinely human writing, especially from non-native English speakers or people writing in an unfamiliar register) and false negatives (missing well-edited AI output). Studies of manual detection consistently find it's close to a coin flip for well-written AI text — which is the actual reason statistical detectors exist.

Paste the full passage rather than a short excerpt — detectors need enough text to establish a reliable pattern, and very short inputs produce less trustworthy scores. Read the sentence-level flags, not just the headline number: a passage that's mostly human with one AI-flagged paragraph tells a very different story than one flagged end to end.

Try it directly on the AI Text Detector — paste any passage and you'll get a confidence score plus sentence-level highlighting in the same view.

Translated text, highly technical or formulaic writing (legal boilerplate, some academic abstracts), and text by non-native English speakers can all shift a detector's score in ways that don't reflect actual AI use. Treat any single scan as a signal to investigate further, not a final answer — particularly before a decision that affects someone.