Latest news with #Copyleaks
CNET
12-06-2025
- CNET
This AI Writing Detector Shows Its Work. For Me, It's a Step in the Right Direction
This article was written by an actual, flesh-and-blood human -- me -- but an increasing amount of the text and video content you come across online is not. It's coming from generative AI tools, which have gotten pretty good at creating realistic-sounding text and natural-looking video. So, how do you sort out the human-made from the robotic? The answer is more complicated than that urban legend about the overuse of em-dashes would have you believe. Lots of people write with an (over)abundance of that particular piece of punctuation, as any editor will tell you. The clues may have more to do with the phrasing and the fact that, as with any writer, large language models tend to repeat themselves. That's the logic behind AI-detection programs. The problem is that those systems are often AI-powered themselves, and they provide few details about how they arrived at their assessments. That makes them hard to trust. A new feature from the AI-detection company Copyleaks, called AI Logic, provides more insight into not just whether and how much of something might have been written by AI, but what evidence it's basing that decision on. What results is something that looks a lot like a plagiarism detector, with individual passages highlighted. You can then see whether Copyleaks flagged it because it matched text on a website known to be AI-generated, or if it was a phrase that the company's research has determined is far more likely to appear in AI-produced than human-written text. You don't even necessarily have to seek out a gen AI tool to produce text with one these days. Tech companies like Microsoft and Google are adding AI helpers to workplace apps, but it's even showing up in dating apps. A survey from the Kinsey Institute and Match, which owns Tinder and Hinge, found that 26% of singles were using AI in dating, whether it's to punch up profiles or come up with better lines. AI writing is inescapable, and there are times when you probably want to know whether a person actually wrote what you're reading. This additional information from a Copyleaks-checked text marks a step forward in the search for a way to separate the AI-made from the human-written, but the important element still isn't the software. It takes a human being to look at this data and figure out what's a coincidence and what's concerning. "The idea is really to get to a point where there is no question mark, to provide as much evidence as we can," Copyleaks CEO Alon Yamin told me. A noble sentiment, but I also wanted to see for myself what the AI detector would detect and why. How AI detection works Copyleaks started out by using AI models to identify specific writing styles as a way to detect copyright infringement. When OpenAI's ChatGPT burst on the scene in 2022, the company realized it could use the same models to detect the style of large language models. Yamin called it "AI versus AI," in that models were trained to look for specific factors like the length of sentences, punctuation usage and specific phrases. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) The problem with using AI to detect AI is that large language models are often a "black box" -- they'll produce an output that makes sense, and you know what went into training them, but they don't show their work. Copyleaks' AI Logic function tries to pull back the veil so people have a better sense of what in the copy they're evaluating might actually be AI-written. "What's really important is to have as much transparency around AI models [as possible], even internally," Yamin said. Read more: AI Essentials: 29 Ways to Make Gen AI Work for You, According to Our Experts AI Logic uses two different approaches to identify text potentially written by an LLM. One, called AI Source Match, uses a database of AI-generated content from sources either created in-house by Copyleaks or on AI-produced sites online. This works much like a traditional plagiarism detector. "What we've discovered is that AI content, a lot of the time, if you ask the same question or a similar question over and over again, you'll get similar answers or a similar version of the same answer," Yamin said. The other component, AI Phrases, detects terms and groups of words that Copyleaks' research has determined are far more likely to be used by LLMs than by human writers. In one sample report, Copyleaks identified the phrase "with advancements in technology" as potentially AI-written. Copyleaks' analysis of generated content found that the phrase appeared 125 times per million AI-written documents, compared with just six times per million documents written by people. The question is, does it work? Can Copyleaks spot AI content and explain why? I ran a few documents through Copyleaks to see if AI Logic can identify what I know to be AI-created content, or if it flags human-written content as AI-written. Example: A human-written classic What better way to test an artificial intelligence tool than with a story about artificial intelligence? I asked Copyleaks to test a section of Isaac Asimov's classic 1956 short story The Last Question, about a fictional artificial intelligence tasked with solving a difficult problem. Copyleaks successfully identified it as 100% matched text on the internet and 0% AI-written. Example: Partially AI-written For this example, I asked ChatGPT to add two paragraphs of additional copy to a story I wrote and published earlier in the day. I ran the resulting text -- my original story with the two AI-written paragraphs added at the bottom -- through Copyleaks. Copyleaks successfully identified that 65.8% of this copy matched existing text (because it was literally an article already on the internet), but it didn't pick up anything as being AI-generated. Those two paragraphs ChatGPT just wrote? Flew completely under the radar. Enlarge Image Copyleaks thought everything in this article was written by AI, even though only a few paragraphs were. Screenshot by Jon Reed/CNET I tried again, this time asking Google's Gemini to add some copy to my existing story. Copyleaks again identified that 67.2% of the text matched what was online, but it also reported that 100% of the text may have been AI-generated. Even text I wrote was flagged, with some phrases, like "generative AI model," described as occurring more frequently in AI-written text. Example: Totally AI-written In a test of generative AI's ability to create things that are totally out of touch with reality, I asked it to write a news story as if the Cincinnati Bengals had won the Super Bowl. (In this fictional universe, Cincinnati beat the San Francisco 49ers by a score of 31-17.) When I ran the fake story through Copyleaks, it successfully identified it as entirely AI-written. Enlarge Image Copyleaks' AI Logic quickly realized this story about the Cincinnati Bengals winning the Super Bowl was written by an AI chatbot. Screenshot by Jon Reed/CNET What Copyleaks didn't do, however, is explain why. It said no results were found in its AI Source Match or its AI Phrases, but with a note: "There is no specific phrase that indicates AI. However, other criteria suggest that this text was generated by AI." I tried again, this time with a different ChatGPT-generated story about the Bengals winning the Super Bowl 27-24 over the 49ers, and Copyleaks provided a more detailed explanation. It calculated the content was 98.7% AI-created, with a handful of phrases singled out. These included some seemingly innocent terms like "made several critical" and "testament to years of." It also included some strings of words that spread across multiple phrases or sentences, like "continues to evolve, the Bengals' future," which apparently occurred 317 times more frequently in the database's AI-generated content than in human text documents. (After raising the issue with the first attempt with Copyleaks, I tried it again and got similar results to this second test.) Just to be sure it wasn't operating entirely on the fact that the Bengals have never won a Super Bowl, I asked ChatGPT to write an article about the Los Angeles Dodgers winning the World Series. Copyleaks found that 50.5% matched existing text online, but also reported it was 100% AI-written. A high-profile example Copyleaks did some testing of its own, using a recent example of a controversial alleged use of AI. In May, the news outlet NOTUS said that a report from the Trump administration's Make America Healthy Again Commission contained references to academic studies that did not exist. Researchers who were cited in the MAHA report told media outlets that they did not produce that work. Citations to nonexistent sources are a common result of AI hallucination, which is why it's important to check anything an LLM cites. The Trump administration defended the report, with a spokesperson blaming "minor citation and formatting errors" and stating that the substance of the report remains unchanged. Copyleaks ran the report through its system, which reported finding 20.8% potential AI-written content. It found some sections around children's mental health raised red flags in its AI Phrases database. Some phrases that occurred far more often in AI-written text included "impacts of social media on their" and "The Negative Impact of Social Media on Their Mental Health." Can an AI really detect AI-written text? In my experience, the increased transparency from Copyleaks into how the tool works is a step forward for the world of AI detection, but this is still far from foolproof. There's still a troubling risk of false positives. In my testing, sometimes words I had written just hours before (and I know AI didn't play a role in them) could be flagged because of some of the phrasing. Still, Copyleaks was able to spot a bogus news article about a team that has never won a championship doing so. Yamin said the goal isn't necessarily to be the ultimate source of truth but to provide people who need to assess whether and how AI has been used with tools to make better decisions. A human needs to be in the loop, but tools like Copyleaks can help with trust. "The idea in the end is to help humans in the process of evaluating content," he said. "I think we're in an age where content is everywhere, and it's being produced more and more and faster than ever before. It's getting harder to identify content that you can trust." Here's my take: When using an AI detector, one way to have more confidence is to look specifically at what is being flagged as possibly AI-written. The occasional suspicious phrase may be, and likely is, innocent. After all, there are only so many different ways you can rearrange words -- a compact phrase like "generative AI model" is pretty handy for us humans, same as for AI. But if it's several whole paragraphs? That may be more troubling. AI detectors, just like that rumor that the em dash is an AI tell, can have false positives. A tool that is still largely a black box will make mistakes, and that can be devastating for someone whose genuine writing was flagged through no fault of their own. I asked Yamin how human writers can make sure their work isn't caught in that trap. "Just do your thing," he said. "Make sure you have your human touch."
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Fact Check: Ford didn't shut down US production due to Trump's tariffs, nor did it move manufacturing overseas
Claim: Ford shut down U.S. production in May 2025 due to President Donald Trump's tariffs and relocated manufacturing operations overseas. Rating: A rumor that circulated online in May 2025 claimed Ford Motor Co. shut down U.S. production because of President Donald Trump's tariffs, and that it also relocated manufacturing operations overseas. However, searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo found no news media outlets reporting about the automaker halting domestic production or moving its operations abroad — either of which would be a major story. Instead, those searches displayed results for popular, advertisement-filled YouTube videos promoting the fabricated claim, including with artificial intelligence-generated scripting, voice narration and editing. Snopes contacted representatives for Ford about this matter and will update this article if they respond. The fictional rumor circulated in the days after Ford announced its first-quarter earnings on May 5, including reporting the expectation of a $1.5 billion tariff impact and withdrawing its 2025 financial guidance due to uncertainty about the future of U.S. trade. CNBC reported the automaker hasn't publicly announced any significant changes to its domestic manufacturing plans but has taken actions to mitigate tariff costs, including ceasing U.S. exports to China, adjusting China-made imports and other logistical changes. On May 7, a manager of the Auto Central YouTube channel (@AutoCentralYT) posted a video (archived) with the title "Ford SHUTS DOWN Production In US And Trumps Reaction Says It All!" The clip received more than 700,000 views, as of this writing. Neither the channel, the video nor the clip's text description included any disclaimers about its content being untrue. The clip's text description began: Ford CEO Jim Farley has just made a shocking announcement that has shook up the whole American auto sector. In reaction to newly elected US President Donald Trump's tough new tariffs on international trade partners, Ford has announced that it will shut down critical elements of its U.S. vehicle production and relocate operations overseas. These wide tariffs make it too expensive for foreign countries to continue purchasing American-made automobiles, trucks, and electric vehicles. As a result, Ford is being compelled to relocate manufacturing overseas, a significant step that might affect thousands of American workers and the future of American auto industry. Scans of the full text description with the AI-detection websites Copyleaks, Phrasly and ZeroGPT all concluded a user likely generated the text with AI. The video displayed an AI-generated thumbnail image of a "breaking news" chyron. The image depicted Ford president and CEO Jim Farley holding a sign reading "14,000 jobs lost & U.S. plants closed." The image also showed an angry Trump in front of an American flag and a Ford building in flames with the word "banned" stamped on top. (Auto Central/YouTube) In another example of the rumor spreading online, on May 18, the similarly-named Auto Edge YouTube channel (@AutoEdgeYoutube) posted a video (archived) with the same title. The clip had more than 600,000 views, as of this writing. No disclaimers about fictional content displayed alongside the video or anywhere in the channel's bio. The clip's thumbnail image displayed a fake Fox News "breaking news" chyron reading "Was this planned?" The image depicted Trump with his mouth open and a Ford factory with the words "Shuts down." (Auto Edge/YouTube) Users on Facebook (archived), TikTok (archived) and (archived) X (archived) shared these videos to further users. Previously, Auto Central, Auto Edge and other YouTube channels promoted videos falsely claiming other companies planned to shut down U.S. operations and move abroad, even though some of the brands have never conducted their primary business domestically. Those companies include Boeing, Jeep, Ram, General Motors, Chrysler, Dodge, John Deere, Nike, GMC, Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick, Toyota, Nvidia, Porsche, Lamborghini, Ferrari, Walmart, Nissan, Honda and Harley-Davidson. Snopes contacted a manager for the Auto Edge YouTube channel by email to ask why they promote made-up content, among other questions, and will update this story if we learn more. The Auto Central channel did not provide any contact methods. For further reading, a previous fact check examined an untrue rumor claiming Ford planned to move four factories back to the U.S., along with 25,000 high-paying jobs, thanks to Trump's tariffs. Another rumor promoted by the Auto Central and Auto Edge YouTube channels also falsely claimed Amazon announced plans to move its headquarters outside the U.S. "AI Detector - Free AI Checker for ChatGPT, GPT-4, Gemini & More." Copyleaks, "AI Detector - Trusted AI Checker for ChatGPT, GPT4 & Gemini." ZeroGPT, "AI Detector: Identify AI-Generated Text." Ford Reports First Quarter 2025 Financial Results. "Ford Says Its Q1 Profit Fell by Two-Thirds and It Expects a $1.5 Billion Hit from Tariffs This Year." The Associated Press, 5 May 2025, Owusu, Tony. "Ford Makes a Drastic Decision in the Face of Tariff Overhang." TheStreet, 6 May 2025, Wayland, Michael. "Ford Suspends 2025 Guidance amid $2.5 Billion Tariff Impact." CNBC, 5 May 2025,
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Fact Check: Posts claim Green Bay Packers rejected ad for Musk's Tesla electric vehicles at Lambeau Field. Here are the facts
Claim: The Green Bay Packers rejected an ad for tech billionaire Elon Musk's Tesla electric vehicles at Lambeau Field. Rating: A rumor that circulated online in May 2025 claimed the Green Bay Packers rejected an advertisement for Tesla CEO Elon Musk's electric-vehicle company at the team's historic Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Snopes received email from readers asking about the rumor. One reader inquired, "Is the claim that the Packers rejected a Tesla ad the truth?" Another reader asked, "Is there any validity to the claim that the Green Bay Packers rejected Elon Musk's Tesla ad at Lambeau Field?" On May 11, a Facebook page named Green and Gold Legacy posted (archived), "HOLY S***: Green Bay Packers Reject Elon Musk's Tesla Ad at Lambeau Field! Packers Give Elon Musk a Very Good Reason for Rejection…" (Green and Gold Legacy/Facebook) That post and several others each included page manager comments that linked to articles hosted on generic-looking WordPress blogs. For instance, the Green and Gold Legacy page displayed a link to an article on the blog The story reported the Packers supposedly rejected the offer because they believed "associating with Tesla at Lambeau Field did not align with their core values or the expectations of their deeply loyal fanbase." The article also cited the Packers' alleged concerns about the safety of Tesla vehicles. However, searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo and Google found no news media outlets reporting on this matter. Rather, the story of the Packers rejecting a Tesla ad — or being offered the chance to promote any such ad in the first place — was false. A representative for the Packers communications team had not yet responded to a request for comment by publication time. Much like the posts promoting the false claim about the Packers, posts from similar Facebook pages claimed other NFL teams also rejected Musk's Tesla ad, including the Buffalo Bills, Minnesota Vikings, San Francisco 49ers, Detroit Lions, Denver Broncos and Dallas Cowboys. Additionally, Facebook pages promoted the rumor about rejecting Musk's ad for leagues other than the NFL, including the NHL's Winnipeg Jets, MLB's Detroit Tigers and NCAA college football's Ohio State Buckeyes. In other words, the people promoting such rumors simply created posts for numerous teams to increase their chances of one of the posts taking off and virally spreading. The posts promoting the rumor each included a link in the first comment leading to an article on an ad-filled blog. Scans of the article with the artificial intelligence-detection websites Copyleaks, QuillBot and ZeroGPT concluded it was extremely likely that someone generated the text using one or more AI tools. People in countries outside the U.S. target Americans with false rumors such as these with the goal of making money, specifically seeking to earn advertising revenue from the generic-looking WordPress blogs that host the articles featured in the Facebook comments. For example, the page transparency tab for the Green and Gold Legacy Facebook page lists its manager as residing in Vietnam, and the website displays numerous ads in several different placements on its pages. The Facebook page managers possibly also seek to build up their social media follower count with the promotion of inauthentic content in order to one day sell the pages for additional revenue. For further reading, a previous fact check examined another false rumor originating from the same kind of inauthentic sports-focused Facebook pages alleging the NBA, NCAA, NFL, NHL or other organizations fired referees for bribery or other misconduct. "AI Detector." QuillBot, "AI Detector - Free AI Checker for ChatGPT, GPT-4, Gemini & More." Copyleaks, "AI Detector - Trusted AI Checker for ChatGPT, GPT4 & Gemini." ZeroGPT,
