Wikipedia's guide to the signs of AI writing

Wikipedia's guide to the signs of AI writing is one of the best out there and it's been updated because they've just banned all AI-generated content there. So here are the top 10 giveaways. No. 1 the puffery problem, so AI loves to tell you how important things are and it can't help itself. A mention of a random place becomes "nestled within a breathtaking region, with a rich cultural heritage". AI can't just state facts, it editorializes them constantly and positively. No. 2 the word list, there are specific words that were much rarer before 2022: delve, tapestry, intricate, underscore. If you see three or four of these in one piece of writing that's a very strong signal and different models have different favourite words, but that's a whole other video. No. 3 the fake balance, so AI constantly uses this "it's not just X, it's also Y" structure. Wikipedia calls these negative parallelisms and they are a very signature style of AI. No. 4 superficial analysis, AI loves attaching these little '-ing' phrases to the end of sentences so like "the population reached 12,000 in 2015, underscoring its role as a regional hub" and that little tag-on, that finish to the sentence is very specific and often quite pointless but it's a real signature thing. No. 5 the rule of three, AI is obsessed with threes separated by commas in sentences, obviously humans do this but it just shows up more in AI writing. No. 6 avoiding the word "is" or other simple words where it replaces it with a fancier alternative, so instead of saying "this building is a gallery" it says "this building serves as a gallery". Instead of "this school has four classrooms" it will write "this school features four classrooms". It's a style common in certain books and magazines that it's learned but human-written everyday blogs and essays and that kind of thing just wouldn't feature that much. No. 7 em dashes, you know about this, the most famous sign of AI writing. OpenAI tried to train them out of ChatGPT actually but failed and they're still there in places where a human would be more likely to use commas or brackets. No. 8 curly quotes, so ChatGPT uses these curly quotation marks, curly apostrophes whereas when you type that yourself on a keyboard it will be straight ones. Now, yes, things like Microsoft Word automatically correct to curly but the biggest giveaway is when it's a mixture of the two in the same piece of writing. No. 9 these very specific word-for-word phrases, you'll have to Google the guide and check them out yourself. One that jumped out to me was "maintains an active social media presence", those exact words when describing any person or brand that uses social media. No. 10 fake references, this is still one of the biggest problems with AI where it generates citations that look legit but are either completely made up or, more frequently, a bit wrong and linking to a dead page.