AI or Not AI: The Controversial Truth Behind Detection Tools for AI-Generated Text

This image was created using OpenAI’s DALL-E, an AI-based image generation tool — (Definitely not Picasso’s lost masterpiece!)

AI-detectors are proliferating, and they are mostly used to determine whether a document was created using AI tools.

So I did some research and tried to figure out how these tools function, specifically how they determine whether a piece of text was generated by an AI chatbot.

I won’t say which AI detector(s) I employed for this study because… Well, it goes unsaid, doesn’t it?

I’ve tested numerous tools. What intrigued me was the inconsistency in the results. For instance, the same tool that identified text X, which was completely AI-generated, as 100% AI-generated, would then suggest that text Y, also created by AI, wasn’t AI-generated at all. Despite employing the same chatbot for both texts — which covered different subjects, one about tomatoes and one about cars — the outcomes varied significantly.

For this particular experiment I settled on using just three AI-detectors.

To begin with, I pasted the first statement of this article [i.e.: AI-detectors are proliferating … it goes unsaid, doesn’t it?] into these tools to test their reliability.

Rest assured, I wrote the content myself, not a single word was AI-generated.