from Hacker News

Ask HN: How can we reliably determine if text was written by AI?

by denis_dolya on 9/18/25, 5:09 PM with 6 comments

• by Poomba on 9/18/25, 6:18 PM

  I dont think you can. If you know who “wrote” it though, you might be able to detect it if its drastically different in tone than what they have written in the past (but even then it might have been ghost written)

• by softwaredoug on 9/18/25, 7:02 PM

  It might be a more tractable question to ask whether the author could have written the text, focusing on evaluating the _author_

  You might imagine, for example, in an academic context combining an in-person Q&A. Or other non-text modalities that currently still are hard to fake.

  (In an academic context, people are pretty stupid with their low-effort prompting and copy-pasting, at least when people finely tune their prompt and writing, its a bit of work and thought)

• by chatmasta on 9/18/25, 10:22 PM

  This would make for a fun quiz game. Show some text that was written by AI or written before 2022 and see how many you can get right. Actually maybe I’ve seen this somewhere…?

• by taylodl on 9/18/25, 5:26 PM

  Turing said there will come a time when you can't!

• by ivape on 9/18/25, 9:18 PM

  The ship has sailed.

• by chistev on 9/18/25, 6:36 PM

  You can't.