Did AI write that? 5 ways to distinguish chatbots from human authors

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• AI models follow certain structural rules when generating text.
• This can make it easier to identify their writing.
• They tend towards contrasts, for example: "It's not X -- it's Y."

The past few years have seen a flood of AI-generated text wash over the internet. As the models behind this text improve, so too does their ability to imitate the intricacies of human speech; at the same time, our methods for detecting it have been improving, and there's been an active online dialogue about some of the most common quirks of AI-generated text.

Historically, one of the more well-known tells of ChatGPT, for example, has been the chatbot's fondness for em dashes. It would often punctuate its sentences with em dash-bounded breaks to emphasize a point -- as if ...