Telling AI-written text from human writing, the measurable differences
Errors and vocabulary give the origin away.
- Answers
- How can you tell if a text was written by AI or by a human?
- Topics
- AI · SEO · art · creativity · data · people · writing
- Full article on willem.com
- https://willem.com/en/2024-11-11_write-your-own-words/
Summary
Look at errors and vocabulary. In research I cited in 2024, 78% of human-written essays contained at least one mistake against 13% of AI essays, and ChatGPT used 35% less unique vocabulary than human writers.
Full text
Researchers from Preply analysed 12,000 student essays to find measurable differences between human and computer-generated writing. Human texts were far more likely to contain mistakes: 78% had at least one error, against only 13% of the AI essays. The most common punctuation errors in human texts were missing commas, hyphen errors and missing spaces. ChatGPT also used 35% less unique vocabulary, 7,308 unique words overall against 11,248 in the human-written texts, and it favoured complex, specialised terms like cultural or economic where humans pick common words like one or people. My wider point stands next to the numbers: if everyone generates content with the same tools, everything starts to look the same, which is why I argue for writing your own words.