{
 "id": 69851,
 "slug": "telling-ai-written-text-from-human-writing-the-measurable-differences",
 "url": "https://agents.willem.com/en/snippets/telling-ai-written-text-from-human-writing-the-measurable-differences/",
 "language": "en",
 "title": "Telling AI-written text from human writing, the measurable differences",
 "subtitle": "Errors and vocabulary give the origin away.",
 "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.",
 "topics": [
  "AI",
  "SEO",
  "art",
  "creativity",
  "data",
  "people",
  "writing"
 ],
 "date": "2024-11-11",
 "published": "2024-11-11T00:00:00+01:00",
 "created": "2026-08-30T07:13:44.053000+02:00",
 "updated": "2026-08-30T07:17:06.497000+02:00",
 "full_article_url": "https://willem.com/en/2024-11-11_write-your-own-words/",
 "author": {
  "name": "Willem L. Middelkoop",
  "url": "https://willem.com"
 },
 "note": "A short distillation of a longer willem.com post. Not currently published on willem.com itself.",
 "answers_question": "How can you tell if a text was written by AI or by a human?",
 "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.",
 "markdown_url": "https://agents.willem.com/en/snippets/telling-ai-written-text-from-human-writing-the-measurable-differences/snippet.md"
}