Do You Need an AI Detector?

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Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of MarTech Toolkit. Today we are talk AI content proliferation and what to do about it in your business.

One of the first targets of AI was the content marketing field. Originally, the main tool was Jarvis AI, with promises of effortless copy, blogs, and basically any written content you could imagine.

Now there’s dozens (if not hundreds) of AI content generators, with ChatGPT being the most widely available and versatile option.

AI is a great toolset, but can produce formulaic, unoriginal, and plain uninteresting content.

To combat this proliferation of mediocrity at scale, a new breed of “AI detectors” has emerged.

These are tools like this week’s sponsor, Originality.ai (more on this and their competitors later…).

But What’s the Problem with AI Content Anyway?

I hinted at it in the intro above, but there are some very good reasons to be aware of AI usage in your content marketing efforts.

1. AI Content is ordinary: Ordinary can be good. It’s often better than straight up bad content. But there’s only so much regurgitation that can be done until everything looks and reads similarly. At the end of the day, purely AI generated content usually doesn’t “say” a whole lot new (even if it fills the page with words). If your team, contractors, or agencies are using AI, this is a good reason to KNOW. Particularly if you are paying them for original thoughts.

2. AI Content has footprints: There’s been much talk and even some confirmation that AI generated content can be “watermarked”. Beyond this, AI content tends to read similarly. For example, most AI outputs shy away from strong opinions (usually because they can’t cite sources well) and struggle to generate human colloquialisms, analogies, or turns of phrase. If Google or other search engines decide to throttle AI content or third-party’s “out” brands, this can have a significant impact on your business.

3. AI Content makes stuff up: AI can be accurate most of the time, or just avoid asserting facts, but it can also frequently enough just make things up or tell you what you want to hear (almost like mad libs). Factually incorrect information is at best misleading to customers and at worst downright dangerous.

It’s Actually a HUMAN Problem

All of this being said, AI is a super helpful tool for a wide variety of applications. Summarizing research, comparing data sets, formatting, troubleshooting, ideation, editing your own work, etc.

This is where AI detectors come in.

It’s helpful to know WHEN and WHERE AI is being used in your content marketing strategy. It’s when you need that “metal detector” to figure out WHERE to engage the human brain for closer inspection.

There may be some false positives or AI that slips through, but over a broad data set it’s a fairly accurate indicator for where you might be getting AI knockoffs submitted as legit original work.

The Best AI Detectors Right Now

So here’s the current landscape for legit AI detectors:

1. Originality.ai: One of the “first movers” in the space, Originality is one of the most accurate and reliably updated models out there, all wrapped in a user friendly interface.

2. Winston AI: Close to Originality in terms of reliability and also has a free plan up to 2000 words to test out.

3. Copyleaks: More of an “all purpose” AI detector, also useful for spotting source code plagiarism for tech projects and AI governance for enterprise level protection.

4. GPTZero: It seems to be much less accurate in my testing, right around 60% versus 80%+ with Originality. HOWEVER, it does appear to be well resourced with a full dev team and making regular improvements.

5. CrossPlag: More of an educational use case, but can be helpful for any content-based AI detection I’m not sure if they have staying power tho as it doesn’t appear to be as frequently updated.

There are certainly OTHER solutions out there. In fact, I have a hard time keeping track of all of them. My top 5 (above) have some staying power and are the top tier I’d recommend looking at first.

If you are curious about any of these or what’s right for your business, feel free to reply to this email.

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