AI Detectors: What You Need to Know (and How to Stay Undetected)

Every Tom, Dick and harry are using the likes of ChatGPT and Claude to generate essays, blog posts, and marketing copy in seconds, a new challenge has emerged: AI detection. Whether you're a student, copywriter, marketer, or content creator, knowing how AI detectors work and how to avoid detection is critical if you're using AI to assist with writing.

This article breaks down how AI detectors actually operate, what they look for, and how to ensure your content stays undetected using the right human input and tools like our AI Humanizer.

What Are AI Detectors?

AI detectors are tools designed to identify whether a piece of text was generated by a human or an AI model like GPT-4. Commonly used detectors include Originality.ai, GPTZero, Copyleaks, and Turnitin's AI checker. These tools are popular in education, publishing, SEO, and legal compliance, aiming to stop AI misuse or ensure content authenticity.

But how do these detectors actually work? Let's break it down.

The Core of AI Detection: Perplexity and Burstiness

Perplexity is a statistical measure of how predictable a piece of text is. If a language model easily predicts the next word in a sentence, that sentence has low perplexity — a telltale sign of AI-generated text. Human writing tends to have higher perplexity, using unexpected phrases or personal turns of phrase that AI doesn't usually replicate.

Burstiness measures how much sentence structure varies. Humans naturally alternate between short and long sentences. AI writing is often smoother and more uniform. A block of medium-length, grammatically perfect sentences might look great to a reader but sets off alarm bells in AI detectors.

Other Detection Techniques You Should Know

In addition to perplexity and burstiness, AI detectors use:

• N-gram frequency analysis: Repetition of common 3–5 word phrases (like "It is important to note that") can signal AI authorship.
• Stylometric analysis: Looks at vocabulary richness, sentence length, punctuation, and function word usage.
• Grammar consistency: Ironically, perfect grammar is suspicious. AI outputs are often cleaner than human writing.
• Non-human formatting: Curly quotes, non-breaking spaces, and other Unicode artifacts can indicate copy-pasted AI output.

Real Examples of AI Detection Triggers

• Too polished: "Furthermore, it is important to recognize the significance of…" — reads like AI. A human might say: "Let's not forget how important this is."
• Repetitive phrases: Using the same wording in intros and conclusions.
• Even pacing: 10 sentences in a row with identical structure. Human writers naturally mix things up.
• No opinion or context: AI text can feel generic. Real human writing includes experiences, preferences, or anecdotes.

So How Can You Avoid Detection?

If you're using AI tools to speed up your writing workflow, you're not alone. But to stay undetected, you'll need to make the output more human. Here's how:

1. Vary Your Sentence Length and Style

Break up long sentences. Mix in rhetorical questions. Start with conjunctions occasionally ("And here's the catch…"). Make your writing breathe.

2. Use Idioms, Slang, or Regional Variants

"Hit the ground running," "a tough nut to crack," or UK-specific expressions like "ten a penny" make writing feel more natural — and less like a GPT.

3. Add a Personal Touch

Insert a quick anecdote, opinion, or real-life example. It doesn't need to be long — just something AI wouldn't say.

4. Break Predictable Patterns

Reword common phrases. Instead of "In conclusion," try "All in all," or "So what's the takeaway?"

5. Clean the Hidden Stuff

Normalize quotation marks, remove hidden characters, and replace fancy formatting. Tools like our AI Humanizer help here.

Use Tools That Help You Stay Human

If you're serious about humanizing your AI-written content, our AI Humanizer tool does the things you can't do easily like removes all unicode and hidden spaces. We are expanding it soon to cover some of the more technical aspects as well so keep your eyes peeled.

Final Thoughts

AI detectors are getting smarter — but they still rely on patterns. To stay under the radar, your content needs to feel naturally inconsistent, emotionally resonant, and just imperfect enough.

If you're using AI to write, remember: it's not cheating to refine the output. It's smart. Use tools like our AI Humanizer to make it sound like you.

That's the difference between flagged and flawless.