The Dangers of “Spotting” AI-Written Articles

Why the quest to identify AI-written articles might not be as straightforward — or as harmless — as it seems.

Margaret Pan
6 min readJul 17, 2024

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Photo by ThisIsEngineering via Pexels

Have you ever wondered if that intriguing article you just read was written by a human or composed by an AI? It’s a question that’s been buzzing lately in digital content circles.

People are trying to pinpoint the telltale signs that scream “AI!” I was reading an article titled “Tell-tale signs your article was written by AI” the other day and I noticed that many of the phrases and styles flagged as AI-generated are ones real writers use too.

In fact, as I read through the list, I realized that I use most of these phrases quite often. And then a thought popped up in my head: if someone were to trust this particular list, would they think my articles are written by AI?

I started overthinking and that got me questioning the whole premise — are we chasing ghosts here?

Can we truly draw a definitive line between the language of machines and that of humans? Are we drawing lines where they don’t really exist?

I did a Google search for articles regarding identifying AI-written work, and as you can imagine, there are hundreds of them out there. You can find articles on…

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Margaret Pan

I write about books, relationships, and personal development. Contact: margaretpannmd@gmail.com Newsletter + more: https://linktr.ee/margpan