AI Content Detection Explained: How It Works & Its Limitations

AI detection tools do not search a database of AI-generated text. Instead, they calculate statistical probability based on word predictability.

The Two Metrics Behind AI Detectors

• Perplexity: A measure of word choice randomness. LLMs choose predictable words; human writing exhibits higher perplexity.
• Burstiness: Variation in sentence length and structure. Humans naturally vary sentence length, while AI outputs uniform sentence sizes.