Background
At Nextlabs, we write and outsource many articles to writers every month. Until 2022, our key challenge was to find writers who produce high quality content. However, in 2023, our key challenge was to ensure that writers do not use AI tools for content delivery.
In order to fight use of AI tools, we put together a team of engineers and data scientists. In the first month itself, we gave up on the idea of building or finding AI content detectors. Later, we felt that our best bet to identify if a human wrote the article was to feed in every single character that the writer wrote, and use ML to classify if it was human written.
Why did we do this?
There were two reasons behind this.
1. We can write prompts that no plagiarism tool can detect, and we tested this too. In fact one of article that drives most impressions on our website, is written by an AI tool. However, not everyone is excellent at using prompts, and the consequences can be devastating. For instance, Google was able to identify and penalize such sites in March 2023. Site impressions for many websites using AI content went down post 15th March 2023 to almost zero. Even though we got lucky with some prompts, we didn’t want to hire people to use AI generated content for our clients.
2. It would be very unfair to the writers who spent hours and days to research on topics. Many honest, hardworking writers would probably gravitate to using this shortcut – without realising its implications. And it would be unfair to them.
As a result of this, we managed to identify and reject content – for both ourselves and for our clients. Our clients don’t pay us for using AI writing tools (We can write very good prompts, so we don’t need a specialist to use AI prompts).
In our content writing job postings (including that of freelance content writer), we saw very high percentage of writers submitting AI written content. Tired of getting repetitive AI written submissions, we added this line to discourage submissions.
Please do note that we have very advanced systems that can detect copied content, usage of AI writers such as Chat GPT – and this will not only lead to rejection now, but will also result in auto-rejection of your candidature in the future.
In writing guidelines, we insisted that the entire article be written on a Google document – which ensures that there’s far more data available to us for making decisions.
Of course, the whole algorithm is classified to prevent abuse/misuse. It has helped us save countless hours that we used to otherwise spend in reviewing AI based content in evaluations, and ensure integrity in the writing process.
Currently, 90% of the submissions that we get are not human generated. Our clients do not expect us to deliver AI based content, and this tool is just a starting point for us to fight it.