How to Tell if Something is AI-Written

You have a “feeling” that a piece of writing is AI-written. It sounds like word salad, a mashup of textual patterns that gestures toward meaning but isn’t actually anchored in reality. The reason for all this is how language models work. Briefly, for humans, language unites a signifier (a word, like “tree”) with a signified (an actual or imagined tree). This relationship is arbitrary, though grounded in social convention and human experience. When we use language we are trusting in and building a shared understanding. When someone says or writes “tree” (or arbre, in French) a tree might spring to mind, even if it is wildly different kind of tree than was meant. Large Language Models (LLMs), however, only operate in the realm of signifiers. There are no signifieds. An LLM generates text through a process called autoregression—it predicts the next word in a sequence based on all the words that came before it. If you give it the phrase, “The cat sat on the…” it analyzes the pattern and pr

You have a “feeling” that a piece of writing is AI-written. It sounds like word salad, a mashup of textual patterns that gestures toward meaning but isn’t actually anchored in reality. The reason for all this is how language models work. Briefly, for humans, language unites a signifier (a word, like “tree”) with a signified (an actual or imagined tree). This relationship is arbitrary, though grounded in social convention and human experience. When we use language we are trusting in and building a shared understanding. When someone says or writes “tree” (or arbre, in French) a tree might spring