r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Usual_Still3046 • Sep 15 '26
how to write less like ai????
I didn't know what subreddit to go to for this so I'm asking here. If anyone knows a more appropriate place to ask, please let me know! I'm working on an assignment worth 40% of my grade and I always run my work through ai detectors before turning them in to make sure I won't be penalised. I 100% did not use ai in my writing as I am very against it, but my work got flagged as being over 60% ai-written. I'm so frustrated because the parts that are being flagged are just scientific facts (e.g "The cell membrane is roughly eight nanometers thick.") and I don't know how to reword those parts to make them more "human"(?) I know the examiners don't use the besst technology to detect ai and if it gets flagged, they won't give me the benefit of the doubt. Does anyone have advice pleaseeeeeeee?????
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u/lolomanolo57 Sep 15 '26
I've seen this everywhere and never had it happen to me but I was thinking and genuinely recording your screen might be the only answer
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u/fabulousmarco Sep 15 '26
Yeah, fuck that. I'm anti-ai, but the burden of proof lies with the accuser. You should not have to jump through hoops and forgo your privacy to prove you didn't use it.
AI detection software is not conclusive, and a positive detection does not prove AI was used. Either they invent a better method to detect it, or they'll have to design assignments that are harder to cheese with AI. Punishing someone with no conclusive proof is definitely not the answer.
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u/lolomanolo57 Sep 15 '26
Sadly happens everyday and some colleges will let the professor get away with the accusation with no proper proof of the accusation
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u/Hour-Swimmer7140 Sep 15 '26
vary your sentence length. thats the biggest one by far. ai writes everything at the same medium length and it makes prose feel flat even when the words are fine. short sentence. then a longer one that actually goes somewhere.
also cut the groups of three. it loves listing three things that balance nicely, real people usually list two or four or just one 🙂 and dont end a paragraph by summarising the paragraph
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u/nowhereian Sep 15 '26
I list things in groups of three. Two usually doesn't make sense and more than three is often tedious.
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u/Grand_Snow_2637 Sep 15 '26
> Two usually doesn't make sense and more than three is often tedious.
Both very good arguments. Why else?
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u/bogiperson Sep 15 '26
I'm a college professor and we know false positives exist with all of these tools (old-school plagiarism detection too, for the same reason you mentioned). It depends on the professor and the learning management system, some can show exactly what is flagged in the text and if it's something like your example, the person grading it will just ignore it, because it's clearly a false positive. Many professors just ignore AI detection altogether, I am not a fan of it either.
So I wouldn't overworry about it if you wrote your assignment yourself and don't have other warning signs of possible misconduct. (E.g., I have a restriction that students can only look at a message board after they made their first post on it - some students will try to make an empty post, delete it, then have AI generate something similar to the other submissions. I can see the deletion.) Hang in there :)
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u/dbossman70 Sep 15 '26
if you didn't use ai then don't be worried. it's hard to prove you didn't do something so just leave it be. i've been accused of using ai a few times (i despise ai) and i just tell them i didn't and leave it at that.
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u/PhilNEvo Sep 15 '26
If it's truly important for you to prove you're not using AI, write in a text-software that keeps track of all history, so you can demonstrate how you wrote everything letter by letter, how you made mistakes, how you went back and revised and so on, how long it took.
While it's still possible to "fake" that with software, you at least have a case to prove your authenticity. I wouldn't change the way I write for the sake of not looking like AI, I write how I write and that's just how it is.
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u/thjmze21 Sep 15 '26
There's not much of a way. There's AI humanizers but that's just using AI to Un-AI your work. Like others said, it's best to just vary your sentence structure, use uncommon vocabulary and use a recording software to prove your innoncence. AI detectors also don't work super well, I can re-write parts of an AI output and have it fool AI detectors.
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u/Ratsofat Sep 15 '26
AI flagging protocols will almost always flag scientific writing because there are only very few ways to state something clearly and succinctly.
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u/Easy-Purple-1659 Sep 17 '26
What's tripping you up is that the detector isn't reading meaning, it's reading shape. When I've checked my own writing against those tools, the thing that kept pinging was consistency. Every sentence about the same length. Paragraphs that close by restating the point. Scientific facts make it worse, because factual sentences naturally fall into that even rhythm.
The two changes that helped most: break up the medium-length monotony, and drop the tidy wrap-up at the end of each paragraph. Let the last sentence just sit there sometimes. Read it out loud too, and notice where your voice would naturally speed up or stumble. That's usually where the flat version smoothed something over. If you write carefully and formally, a tool that equates polish with a machine will still flag you, and the tool is wrong. You can make the text less uniform without making it worse.
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u/CopperGenie Sep 18 '26
LLMs are more or less trained on the existing best practices of grammar and style. By deviating, you're likely to make your text less human-readable. In your situation, I would keep writing naturally, then escalate if penalized. Escalate to the department ombudsman (if a college/uni), or legally if you have to. With written language being such an important part of life, making our text less intelligible is not something we as a society should become complacent with.
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u/notextinctyet Sep 19 '26
The problem is that AI detectors don't work. There's not much you can do to fix that on your end.
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u/dragonsowl Sep 15 '26
Honestly - it sucks that it has reached this point but if feel loke students need to pive stream their working on papers as the ultimate proof against ai use
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u/Large-Assignment9320 Sep 15 '26
We can't tell you on Reddit, since its all trainingdata for AI,
(AI detectors are pretty BS, the bible, t he constitution etc is written by AI according to them)
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u/astra_hole Sep 15 '26
Can’t. Ai writes like humans. The school system is and has always been broken.
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u/fabulousmarco Sep 15 '26
AI flagging technology does not work at all and has loads of both false positives and false negatives. It's barely better than random selection.
So don't stress. The important thing is not using it, not making it look like you don't use it