5 Best AI Detection Tool: Free and Paid Options

These top AI detector tools help you determine if a text was written by ChatGPT or a similar generative AI application.

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AI content detector platforms use artificial intelligence (AI) to identify text written or media assets produced with a generative AI model. Teachers, editors, writers, or any reader who wants to know whether a piece of content is human-authored or computer-generated can use them for a wide range of use cases, from preventing students from turning in AI-generated essays to detecting bot content among posts and comments in online forums. While generative AI platforms like ChatGPT have many positive applications, their usage has raised concerns about ethics, authenticity, and potential security risks. AI detectors can help mitigate those risks by providing transparency, ensuring academic integrity, and promoting quality.

I evaluated the best AI detector solutions to see how they compare features, costs, and pros and cons to help you determine the best option for your organization’s needs. Here are my picks for the top five AI detection tools:

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As generative AI tools continue improving and expanding, reliable AI detection tools become more important. The following chart summarizes how the top tools compare in terms of use case, features, and price. Note that all prices are with a one-year commitment.

I picked Originality.ai as the overall best AI detection tool. It ranked first for core features and ease of use and tied for content accuracy and user support. Read to learn more about each tool’s use case, pricing, and key features, or see my scoring logic.

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Best Overall AI Detector

Originality.ai is one of the best AI detector tools on the market. It uses advanced artificial intelligence algorithms to scan text for AI and plagiarism. It requires 50 words or more of content to work effectively and boasts better than 94 percent accuracy on text generated with GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and ChatGPT, 99 percent accuracy on GPT-4 content, and 94.5 percent accuracy on paraphrased content. Scanning content with this tool returns the AI percent score and the original percent or human score.

Originality.aiI is known for a clean and intuitive user interface that simplifies originality checks. You can easily add content for AI detection or plagiarism checking by uploading a file, entering a URL, or writing the text. The platform also features a user-friendly dashboard that displays the analyzed content, AI detection score, and color-coded sections to highlight possible plagiarized phrases.

Originality.ai recently launched an improved version of its multilingual AI detector, including the new OpenAI model GPT-4-turbo. Version 1.3 demonstrates better performance than version 1.2 and excellent prediction quality across standard metrics and for all AI models.

Originality.ai is the best overall AI detector tool for its affordability, robust feature set, usability, and high accuracy rate. The tool offers limited free scans that you can use to test the platform, and paid plans are also affordable for smaller teams and organizations. It’s also easy to use with intuitive tools, providing users with clear results to improve their work. With Originality.ai, managers or owners can manage teams by assigning roles to team members, making it ideal for organizations with distributed editorial teams. Originality.ai deploys excellent computing power to scan text when running its detection model compared to other tools.

Best for Content Marketing Agencies

Copyleaks is an advanced AI-powered plagiarism and content detection tool designed to help individuals, educators, and agencies ensure content originality. The platform boasts 99.12 percent accuracy and detects content created with ChatGPT, GPT-4, GPT-3, Jasper, and other language models. The platform goes beyond common plagiarism detection features and helps you secure intellectual property and copyright by running a comprehensive content audit.

Copyleaks offers a user-friendly interface that’s easy to navigate, even for users without technical expertise. Although the platform uses a lot of backend processing to detect AI-generated content, the user experience is relatively smooth and straightforward. Copyelaks also has a browser extension that allows users to check web pages for AI content without manually copying and pasting content. Copyleaks recently introduced more features, including a writing assistant, learning management system (LMS) analytics, and improved AI detection.

Copyleaks is a valuable tool for content marketing agencies, helping them maintain originality and protect their intellectual property. The platform’s comprehensive reporting features to get specific and clear evidence of whether their content is being used without proper consent, even with large language models (LLMs). With a single scan, you can get a 360-degree view of how your content is potentially being used, helping you identify potential copyright infringement, unauthorized use, and plagiarism.

Copyleaks pricing depends on the number of credits you need, with each credit equaling 250 words. It offers four pricing plans billed monthly and annually with no specific upper limit:

Best for Educators

GPTZero is a classification model that Princeton University student Edward Tian developed to help educators predict and detect AI-written text. It analyzes texts based on their perplexity—a measurement of the randomness of a text—and “burstiness,” which measures the predictability of content based on patterns. According to the developer, the tool was trained on a large and diverse human-written and AI-generated text, focusing on English prose. Those looking to integrate GPTZero into their system can request the API, but it comes with a fee.

GPTZero boasts a clean and simple design, with a dashboard that shows the AI detection score and other parameters. You can upload multiple files or drag and drop documents from a folder to run them for content detection. You can quickly switch between tabs to choose basic scan, advanced detection, or plagiarism check. You can also quickly scan the text you analyzed and hover over highlighted areas to see the likelihood that the content is AI-generated.

GPTZero is a powerful tool for educators, allowing them to maintain academic integrity and ensure that the student’s work is authentic. If you’re an educator and need a tool to make your work more efficient, you can use GPTZero’s AI teaching assistant to check spelling, grammar, style, and tone. You can also use the tool to examine the flow or logic of the text and enhance content. Additionally, you can record your writing process and use it as teaching material for your students or proof that the content is your original work.

Best for Customer-Facing Teams

Developed by former researchers at the University of California Berkeley, Stanford, and Google, Sapling.ai is a multipurpose AI tool with various functions, including a grammar checker, punctuation checker, sentence rewriter, and AI detector. Because the platform has so many tools built into it, it’s well set up for the needs of fast-paced agencies and customer-facing teams. Sapling.ai detects GPT-3, GPT-3.5, ChatGPT, and GPT-4 AI contents. Sapling.ai provides the total percentage of fake or AI-generated content in a given text and highlights the AI-generated content in red. Sapling.ai claims to detect 97 percent of AI-generated text.

Sapling.ai is designed for business communication to help teams communicate more effectively with their clients. It provides real-time suggestions to help sales, support, and success teams correspond with customers with personalized responses instead of using AI chatbots. Sapling.ai is also readily accessible via any web browser and offers a limited free tool, making it easier for users to test the tool right away.

While Sapling.ai offers a robust suite of tools for customer-facing teams, its interface can sometimes feel cluttered. Despite the potential for clutter, the AI detection tool’s essential functionalities remain easily accessible.

Sapling.ai stands out as an ideal tool for customer-facing teams to offer personalized and timely responses. This platform has partnered with OpenAI to be able to deliver the most helpful suggestions in a team’s response bank and knowledgebase. The AI detection tool also helps flag AI-generated content, ensuring that responses to customer inquiries are original rather than generated by an AI tool. Additionally, Sapling.ai is also one of the most affordable tools on this list, making it an excellent AI detection tool for small teams or startups.

Best for Data-Driven Professionals

Winston AI is a leading AI content detector and plagiarism checker software for ChatGPT, GPT4, Google Gemini, and other large language models (LLMs). Winston AI has a wide range of applications originally designed for writers, educators, and web publishers. Winston AI also supports optical character recognition (OCR) technology, which allows users to scan image files for AI content. It can detect AI-generated images and deepfakes made with Midjourney, DALL-E, stable diffusion, meta AI, and more.

Winston AI has a clean and intuitive user interface. It features a dashboard that allows users to easily choose the action they need, such as scanning content, websites, images, and more. To perform a content scan, you can upload a file, import from a URL, or paste the text before running it for AI detection. After scanning, the dashboard instantly displays the highlighted text, showing metrics like human score, readability, and plagiarism percentage. Winston AI’s color-coded results are also easy to understand, interpret, and share with the team.

Winston AI is a powerful tool for data-driven professionals and teams, providing comprehensive insights into content authenticity. Whatever field you belong to, Winston AI is a valuable tool for analyzing and detecting AI-generated text and images. You can also effortlessly share the results of an AI content detection and plagiarism scan with your team or clients via a link or PDF. Winston AI stands out for its image detection, which uses the latest technology to run a complete analysis to identify if Midjourney, DALL-E, stable diffusion, and more generate outputs.

When deciding on AI detector software for your organization, there are certain core features to look for. While some tools don’t include all these capabilities, choose the best AI detector that suits your needs.

The accuracy of the AI content detector software is critical to its effectiveness. The tool should be able to accurately identify and flag inappropriate or harmful content, spam, and copyrighted material. It’s important to select a solution with a high accuracy rate, as false positives and negatives can have significant consequences.

AI detector software that highlights text makes it easy for users to identify parts of their content that need to be rewritten to sound more human. Some parts of your copy may be flagged as AI-generated when it was 100 percent human-written—the highlighted text might help you know where to adjust or modify so that your text won’t be flagged.

Educators, content marketers, and SEO experts may find this feature beneficial. Using multiple tools to evaluate content based on parameters like grammar, plagiarism, readability, and detection score may be time-consuming and inefficient. AI detectors with plagiarism checkers take the burden of using multiple tools off editors and managers, enabling them to check copy originality and quality.

AI detector tools employ advanced algorithms to accurately identify AI-generated text, images, and other media assets. These AI solutions train on massive datasets to distinguish between human-generated and AI-created content with accuracy and reliability.

With API integrations, AI content detector software can seamlessly integrate with other tools and platforms, such as content management systems (CMS), social media platforms, and e-commerce platforms. This feature makes automating the content moderation process easier and reduces the need for manual review.

In evaluating AI detector tools, I scored each option against six key criteria for individuals and businesses looking for a robust and reliable solution. From there, I divided each category into weighted subcriteria and assigned an overall score out of five to determine the winner for each category.

In scoring the AI detector tools, I put the highest weight on core features and accuracy, followed by advanced features and cost. I also evaluated each solution’s ease of use and customer support.

Although most AI detectors claim to have 90 percent accuracy rates, remember that these systems are always evolving and undergoing training. The best solution for your business is one that meets your needs and serves your company’s purpose.Start by researching the top solutions available in the market and the features you need. After narrowing down the potential tools and features, run at least five AI-generated articles and human-written copy, respectively. Then, compare each tool and observe if any false positives or false negatives occur. Ultimately, choose the AI detector tool with the highest accuracy rates, affordable plans, and robust suite of features.

Generative AI offers various benefits for different use cases but can pose some theoretical concerns and security risks. AI content detectors measure content’s perplexity and burstiness to identify patterns in the text.Perplexity and burstiness are two techniques that AI content detectors use to identify patterns in text. Perplexity measures how well a language model can predict a sequence of words—think of it as the randomness of words—while burstiness is the frequency of word usage in a given context. Consider “burst” the uniqueness of the random words.

Yes, Google can detect AI-generated content by searching for patterns like text structure, grammar, text syntax, and inconsistencies.

AI content detectors are invaluable solutions for your overall SEO strategy. Consider using it if you need to verify your content’s authority, authenticity, quality, and transparency.

No, AI content detectors cannot detect AI-generated text with 100 percent accuracy. While they have improved significantly in recent years, they still have limitations and can produce false positives and false negatives.

The field of generative AI continues to evolve, and more businesses use tools to create content that might raise ethical concerns. Using these powerful tools can result in intellectual dishonesty or, in some cases, expose sensitive corporate data to security and compliance risks. With these risks in mind, organizations of all types will likely want to select an AI detector tool that works best for their unique situation.

Before deciding which tool to use for your business, consider our list or look into leading generative AI companies to see what new tools they offer. Whether you work in sales, content marketing, education, or another industry, sign up for free versions or trials to get a hands-on experience before deciding which AI detection tool to purchase.

Learn more about tools to help you create engaging content by reading our guide to the best AI writing tools.

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