Detecting AI
Once upon a time, the concept of “artificial intelligence” was merely a phrase that sparked the creativity of numerous science fiction writers. It was a term confined to speculative fiction and ambitious predictions of what the future might hold. Just a few years back, artificial intelligence appeared as distant from reality as flying cars or universal healthcare in the US.
However, similar to other futuristic or idealistic visions, the public held a deep fascination for artificial intelligence. These concepts do not endure in popular culture for decades simply due to their novelty. When an idea appears repeatedly in novels, tales, and films, it indicates a enduring fascination among people.
When there is a strong interest and curiosity about a subject, there also lies a lucrative opportunity for companies. These companies can capitalize on the public’s fascination by transforming long-held dreams into tangible realities, potentially reaping substantial financial rewards.
To this end, what is now referred to as AI in the real world has surprisingly little in common with what the term has meant in fictional universes and speculation for decades, making it a misnomer.
Instead, what is referred to as AI is an automated digital blender that operates off algorithms and analysis. Unlike the algorithms that dictate your social media feed, AI isn’t driven by actual intelligence in its artificiality.
Still, by embracing the term, AI has garnered much more attention and revenue from the general public. However, regarding AI-generated content, does it benefit websites to use AI when creating written articles? That’s a complicated question with an even more complex answer.
Fortunately, services such as our AI Detector are vital in this struggle, equipping users with the tools necessary to parse and trace back the origins of a given written work.
History of Digital Services
When computers first began to find their way into people’s homes worldwide in the late ’90s and early ’00s, the internet was nothing short of the digitized equivalent of the Wild West. Uncharted, largely unregulated, and open for business, the vast open plains of cyberspace incited their digital version of the great Gold Rush as people realized the potential earnings from operating within this new space. Suddenly, the internet was filled with hundreds of new websites.
Some were digital fronts for already established and reputable real-world outlets and publications, allowing online users unprecedented access to these resources at their fingertips. Others were brand-new ventures launched by ambitious individuals who realized there needed to be more to differentiate a storied publication from a new one in this new space. Any site on the internet could hit it just as big as the next in these halcyon days, each site full of human-made writing presenting just as valid as the next.
As the decades wore on, the internet lost some of its novelty and began connecting users to the websites they frequented in increasingly complex and invasive ways. By the 2020s, many Americans were reading news stories less than receiving the highlights and headlines via social media websites. In this way, the internet was filling up with stories that existed to convey a crucial new development but were essentially going unread.
Into this environment entered AI, capable of generating vast chunks of written text based upon input information and human-generated prompts in just a few short moments.
Now, websites would no longer have to pay human writers to craft articles or web pages; they could feed similar articles to the AI generator, prompt it with the headline, and let it do the rest of the work. While this was immensely beneficial to the companies and individuals running the websites, both financially and in terms of efficiency, it was not so suitable for everyone else.
Widespread AI
It was terrible news for the human writers out of a job. It was even worse news for the human readers, as these AI-written articles proved unreliable, full of faulty information, and directly responsible for spreading mass amounts of misinformation.
Nowhere were these faults and defects more apparent than in the lead-up to the 2024 US Presidential Election, during which time the algorithmically dictated social media feeds of each respective user worked in tandem with AI-generated articles and images to create individualized echo chambers.
With the sheer amount of content available on the internet having skyrocketed in direct correlation to the introduction and widespread implementation of AI, it’s clear there is a relationship between AI and its human users prioritizing quantity over quality.
Considering that companies such as Meta and Google have gone so far as to embrace AI over the past several months outright, is there any hope of combatting the rapid spread of AI-generated content? Sort of.
Detecting AI
According to recent research by Cornell University, online readers have demonstrated a keen sense of what is or isn’t AI-generated and a strong desire to differentiate between the two. Our service, AI Detector, allows them to understand better if an article is AI-generated and, if so, where it got (or plagiarized) its information from.
Furthermore, Marketing Insider Group’s Man vs. Machine report states that human-authored content outperforms AI and hybrid content in keyword rankings and web traffic. Not only this, this research showed that the most popular, successful, and widely engaged pieces of writing were all uniformly been human-written without AI.
This means that while AI enables sites to create articles and webpages much faster and crank them out rapidly, they ultimately sacrifice quality and potential engagement when they do so. Humans are not machines, and even though the public may be unable to articulate precisely what it is about it, AI-generated writing tends to feel cold, mechanical, and distinctly removed from the human perspective.
By capitalizing on the term’ artificial intelligence’ and purporting to deliver a kind of wish fulfillment, AI has broken through to the mainstream in a big way, becoming a vital part of numerous fields and industries.
However, while AI is good at quickly generating a lot of text, it has been repeatedly shown to be less good at mimicking or miming authentic human emotions, which has cost it and its users substantially.
Members of the editorial and news staff of Law&Crime were not involved in the creation of this content.
