Who wrote it – AI or human? Sometimes the question is not so clear-cut. Currently, more and more tools are coming onto the market that claim to provide answers. But what to do if there is a false positive? Our colleague, PR consultant and editor Marcel Richters, has looked into this question – and, of course, answered it.

Sometimes the discussion about AI texts takes on rather bizarre forms. We recently had such a case at public imaging GmbH. It was about a guest contribution for a major business publication which – quite rightly – does not accept AI-written texts. To rule this out, the submitted texts are run through a tool at this publication which, according to its own statements, combines "state-of-the-art AI with comprehensive plagiarism detection."

The result of the check in our case: 63 percent of the text was allegedly written by an AI. Our colleague Sven Lindner, who had written the text by hand, is simply a machine. Or maybe not, because what is to be made of these tools is another matter entirely. (By the way, there is an exciting episode of the AI Podcast on this.) But all doubts about the performance of the tools do not help us if the publication then rejects the text.

So what to do? We turned the supposed AI text into one that was clearly handwritten. A few more filler words, a few less sentences that were simply strung together but instead related more strongly to each other, a few central statements at the beginning of the respective sentence instead of at the end. This does not necessarily make the text easier to read, so such means should be used sparingly. But with the right dosage, a text that is perhaps a little too smoothly polished can be given a bit more personality.

Learning from the "Arts and Crafts" movement

It is important to keep in mind how AI, and particularly Large Language Models, work. Every sequence of characters and every sequence of words is based on probabilities. This very often results in uniform sentence structures and formulations, and rather rare words like "handwritten" (or "händisch" in German) – which according to Duden appears on average less than once in a million word forms of the Duden corpus – do not appear at all.

Personally, this brings the "Arts and Crafts" movement to mind, which, with its craftsmanship during the Industrial Revolution, sought to represent a counter-movement to machine-produced mass goods. The work of us copywriters probably doesn't go quite that far. But the quintessence is clear: if you want to reach your readers, you now have to focus on craftsmanship more than ever. But that's what we are here for.

Who wrote it – AI or human? Sometimes the question is not so clear-cut. Currently, more and more tools are coming onto the market that claim to provide answers. But what to do if there is a false positive? Our colleague Marcel Richters has looked into this question – and, of course, answered it.