Content creation has always been a slow and time-hungry process. It demands a lot of effort and expertise from the content marketing team. However, the inception of generative AI has completely transformed this process, making it faster and scalable without sacrificing quality or accuracy. Content marketing teams of today can leverage AI-powered tools to instantly generate high-quality and personalized content.
But this rapid evolution of AI-generated content has brought forth a new challenge for content creators - the rise of AI detectors that are identifying and flagging AI-generated text. This has raised concern among content creators as the popularity of these tools could be an alarm for impending disaster - search engines may start penalizing AI-generated content, pulling their SERP ranking down.
But the million-dollar question is - Are these AI detector tools really effective?
Before diving into the answer, let us find out what Google has to say about AI content. After all, the primary goal of most content marketing teams is to secure a high rank in Google SERP for their content pieces.
What does Google say about AI content?
Google is not averse to AI-generated content. All it wants is for the content to be helpful to the people. In other words, it does not want the content to be created for search engines but for its answer-seeking audience.
Google's core system rewards content demonstrating EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), especially since the helpful content update in the second half of 2022. If your AI-generated content doesn’t demonstrate EEAT, it will not rank high. Google also has a spam policy that states any content generated via automated processes without considering quality or UX is against its guidelines.
Here’s a tweet from Google’s SearchLiaison highlighting Google’s take on AI-generated content -
Also read: Just in on Google Update: Google Sheds Light on the Importance of AI-generated Content in Search
Can AI-written content be detected?
To answer this question, let us analyze the top 5 tools that detect AI content. For each of these tools, we are going to follow the below steps:
- Input pure AI-generated content into each of the tool
- Analyze the results
- Manually edit the content
- Input the edited content once again into the tool
- Analyze the results
1) Writer
Writer is a suite of writing tools, including a robust AI content detector. While the AI detector is free, it has a limit of just 1500 characters. This is suitable for checking only small content pieces comprising 2-3 paragraphs. If you want to increase your character limit, you have to subscribe to one of their premium plans, which also comes with a free 14-day trial.
Results with pure AI content
As you can see from the above results, Writer has detected an entirely AI-written piece as 47% human-generated. This means it is not accurate and effective when it comes to detecting pure AI-generated content.
Results with manually edited AI content
Source: Writer
After manually editing the content, we found the human-generated content score shooting up to 99%. This shows that the tool is unable to identify AI content after basic manual editing.
2) Hugging Face
Hugging Face is a community and data science platform that offers tools to build, train, and employ Machine Learning models. It also features an AI content detector that identifies whether your content is fake or real based on who wrote the content. This open-source tool is entirely free and has no limit on the number of characters.
Results with pure AI content
Source: Hugging Face
This tool was more accurate than Writer as it could detect 93% of the content as fake or written by AI. However, the 7% human-generated content is still a point of contention as there was no human-written content in this piece.
Results with manually edited AI content
Source: Hugging Face
After manually editing the content, the tool was able to clearly identify the piece as human-written content. It highlighted that 99% of the content was real. Again, this shows that you can easily bypass the tool with a round of editing.
3) AI detector - Content at Scale
Content at Scale is an AI writing software powered by 3 artificial intelligence engines, NLP, and semantic analysis algorithms. Besides its superior capability to create new content, it has an accurate AI detector tool. The best thing about this tool is that it is free and has a 25,000 characters word limit which is more than sufficient for most long-form blogs. However, on the downside, the tool takes a few more seconds than it is supposed to check longer content pieces.
Results with pure AI content
Source: Content at Scale
This is the most accurate tool on this list as it clearly showed that the entire content piece is fake and written by AI.
Results with manually edited AI content
Source: Content at Scale
Upon entering manually edited content, it generated a human content score of 85%. This is understandable because our original content was generated by AI.
4) GPT-2 Output Detector Demo
Unlike other tools on this list, GPT-2 Output Detector Demo is a standalone AI content detector that is entirely open-source. The platform uses a concept of tokens instead of words or characters, which might confuse some users. But the good thing about this tool is that the results are instantly generated even without clicking any submit button.
Results with pure AI content
Source: GPT-2 Output Detector Demo
Like Content at Scale, GPT-2 Output Detector was quite accurate as it could detect that 99.88% of the content was AI-generated.
Results with manually edited AI content
Source: GPT-2 Output Detector Demo
The results were quite in line with Content at Scale, as it could still find traces of AI content in the piece.
Also read: Scalenut AI vs ChatGPT: Which One Is Better For Content Marketing Team
5) AI Content Detector
The last tool in our list is from the popular website Poem of Quotes, which is a vast library of poems, quotes, and funny sayings from thousands of authors. The platform also houses a collection of tools, including an AI content detector. Unlike other tools on this list, this platform doesn’t display a percentage score to detect the level of AI content in your article. This makes it difficult to gauge the efficacy of the tool.
Results with pure AI content
As you can see in the above results, it just lets you know whether the content was written by a human or an AI. In our case, it has accurately highlighted that the piece was written by AI.
Results with manually edited AI content
After editing the content, we could easily convince the tool that the content was written by a human.
Tips to make the AI-generated first draft useful for readers
- Ensure that the context is not missing in the final content piece. It is important to provide your readers with a deeper understanding of your content. This will make the information more relevant, meaningful, and engaging.
- Before using AI to generate text, especially for long-form, always be clear on who your audience is and why you are writing the content. Apart from that, you must also ensure that you have identified the structure of the blog. You can use Scalenut’s SEO Writing module to automatically create an outline for your blog based on your target keyword.
- Check for factual accuracy in your content. One of the biggest drawbacks of an AI tool is that it might not be factually correct all the time. There are chances that the tool is not updated with the latest data and happenings around the world. So always double-check the content for any factual errors, and replace them with the latest information.
- One of the core factors used by search engines to rank your content is its readability. After all, the content you create should be digestible for the users. Sometimes, AI content might seem very complex to understand, thereby affecting readability. So make sure that you manually edit the content and make it easy to consume before publishing.
Also read: Using ChatGPT To Support Your SEO Efforts
Conclusion
As we have seen in this post, AI-generated content is here to stay as long as it offers value and is written for people. The tools we analyzed in this post are good at detecting content entirely written by AI. However, they can be easily bypassed after a single round of manual editing. This shows that your AI content is legitimate and can be used for your content marketing efforts.
About Scalenut
Scalenut is an AI-powered SEO and content marketing platform that helps you manage your entire content life cycle, from planning and research to writing and optimization, and even publishing.
It helps marketers all over the world make high-quality, competitive content at scale. Empower your content marketing campaigns with AI. Sign up on Scalenut, and start creating content today.
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