Three paragraphs, from three different hotel reviews. Can you tell which, if any, were AI‑generated?
“The hotel is in a great location for everything. Lots of places to eat and drink. The hotel itself is always abuzz. The tavern located on the ground floor is definitely a must. Food, service, prices and atmosphere were great.”
“A good hotel, though the room had the proportions of a well-appointed lift. Slept well, shower was excellent, staff were friendly. Breakfast was busy but competent. Would return, though probably not with a very large suitcase.”
“Excellent base for a London trip. The room was quiet, the bed comfortable, and everything worked exactly as it should. Staff were helpful without hovering. A smooth, unfussy stay from start to finish.”
How do you reckon you did? Most people, says Claire Hardaker, a professor of forensic linguistics at the University of Lancaster, get this kind of judgment right only about 60% of the time. Her online test, Bot or Not, asks users to identify the fakes in a series of 15 reviews. The middling success rate might come as a surprise to those convinced they can spot AI writing at 50 paces. When doubts were raised in May about the authenticity of a prizewinning short story by Jamir Nazir, social media users were lightning-quick in their condemnation. “If you know, you know,” commented one.
Hardaker says her respondents tend to rely on a few quick rules of thumb to identify AI language, including the presence of cliches and the use of dashes. The “rule of three”, where words or phrases are arranged in a satisfying trio, is also thought to be a giveaway. “People have learned very simplistic rubrics and now just madly apply them everywhere.”
There’s a problem, though: these “tells” are also characteristic of human writing, which, after all, the large language models (LLMs) that produce them were trained on. “You could go back to Charles Dickens and say he had AI, because he used the em dash too.” And orators have known about the rule of three ever since Julius Caesar said Veni, vidi, vici. In our hotel review examples, only the first one was authentic. Did you clock it?
Perhaps because it is so hard to know for sure, suspicion has become the order of the day. In the literary world, accusations of AI use now bedevil writers, with varying levels of justification. A debut horror novel, Shy Girl, was withdrawn by publishers Hachette after rumours circulated online that the author had relied on AI, which she denies; Steven Rosenbaum’s book The Future of Truth, a serious study of “how AI reshapes reality”, was found to contain numerous hallucinated quotations, which the author acknowledged in an apology.
Media organisations, including the Guardian, field increasing numbers of complaints about supposedly AI-generated text. These include intuitions about particular turns of phrase, but also comments about typos and grammatical errors. In one case, the word “after” was…
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