Most AI detection tools cost $15-30/month and still produce false positives. The underlying problem is simpler than the pricing suggests: AI-generated text follows statistical patterns that you can learn to spot yourself, with a little help from the right heuristics.
Here is a straightforward approach to auditing content that takes about two minutes per piece.
Understand What Detection Actually Measures
AI detection is not magic. It looks at a handful of measurable text properties and compares them against known distributions for human vs. machine writing. The main signals are:
Sentence uniformity. Human writers produce sentences that vary wildly in length -- a four-word fragment followed by a 30-word compound sentence. GPT-style models tend to smooth this out. If your paragraph has five sentences all between 15 and 20 words, that is a flag.
Vocabulary diversity. Also called type-token ratio. Humans repeat words inconsistently -- sometimes using a synonym, sometimes not. Language models optimize for clarity, which often means reusing the same term. Low lexical diversity across a long piece suggests generation.
Burstiness. This measures how unevenly complexity is distributed. Human writing has bursts -- a dense technical paragraph followed by a conversational aside. AI output tends toward uniform complexity throughout.
Hedging frequency. Phrases like "it is important to note," "it is worth mentioning," and "generally speaking" appear at rates in AI text that are statistically uncommon in human prose.
"We started running client copy through heuristic checks before publishing, and the number of revision cycles dropped. It is not about catching anyone -- it is about catching patterns that read as flat." -- Dennis Traina, 137Foundry
Run the Audit
Paste your text into EvvyTools and review the breakdown. It analyzes sentence uniformity, vocabulary diversity, burstiness, AI phrase density, and hedging frequency -- then returns a probability estimate. No login, no paywall.
Look at which specific metrics flagged. A piece might score fine overall but show high sentence uniformity in the middle three paragraphs. That tells you where to focus edits.
Fix What the Numbers Surface
You do not need to rewrite from scratch. Target the flagged patterns:
- High uniformity? Vary your sentence length deliberately. Break a long sentence in two. Combine two short ones.
- Low burstiness? Add a short, blunt opinion between technical paragraphs. Shift register.
- Hedging overload? Delete every instance of "it is worth noting" and see if the sentence still works. It usually does.
The goal is not a perfect score. It is content that reads like a person wrote it with intent, because a person did -- with some mechanical assists along the way.
Research from Stanford and Georgetown on AI-generated text detection is worth reading for context on limitations. OpenAI's own position on detection acknowledges the difficulty. And if you want the academic framing, the Giant Language Model Test Room from MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab visualizes token probability in a way that makes the statistics intuitive.
Two minutes of auditing saves hours of credibility questions later.
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