Grammarly to roll out a new AI content detector tool. Here’s how it works

In this age of artificial intelligence (AI), determining whether text was written by a bot or a person has become increasingly difficult. Several detection products have already popped up — but with decidedly mixed results. Now, Grammarly is kicking off its tool, which it believes will better detect which parts of a document were created by AI versus humans.

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Dubbed Grammarly Authorship, the new program will work across 500,000 apps and websites. The latest software will try to identify the origin of each part of the document, uncovering which sections were created by a person, which ones were pasted from another source, and which ones were cooked up by AI.

Unlike other such products that use an algorithm to detect the presence of AI, Authorship tracks everything written in a document. Because the tool is active during the writing process, it’s able to tell if a human is typing text or copying and pasting it from an outside source.

Authorship will launch in beta in Google Docs for all Grammarly customers starting next month and expand to Microsoft Word and Apple’s Pages by the end of the year. The tool will work in all editions of Google Docs, both free and paid, and in all instances of Word, both on the desktop and on the web.

As an automated writing and editing assistant, Grammarly offers several plans, including a free basic flavor, a $12-per-month Premium subscription, a $15-per-month Business subscription, and an edition for schools and students. Authorship will be accessible in any of those plans, including the free one.

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Though Authorship will be available to any individual, business, or other customer, Grammarly is targeting the education market in particular. This is partly because of false positives — instances where students have turned in papers and assignments they wrote themselves but were flagged as AI-generated.

“As the school year begins, many institutions lack consistent and clear AI policies, even though half of people ages 14–22 say they have used generative AI at least once,” Jenny Maxwell, head of Grammarly for Education, said in a statement. “This lack of clarity has contributed to an overreliance on imperfect AI detection tools, leading to an adversarial back-and-forth between professors and students when papers are flagged as AI-generated.

“What’s missing in the market is a tool that can facilitate a productive conversation about the role of AI in education,” Maxwell added. “Authorship does just that by giving students an easy way to show how they wrote their paper, including if and how they interacted with AI tools.”

Once activated in a document, Authorship will automatically categorize text as typed by a human, generated by AI, modified with AI, pasted from a known or unknown source, or edited by Grammarly or a separate spell checker. Whether you’re writing or reviewing the document, you also will find key details about Authorship’s analysis.

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Authorship analytics will break down the different categories, such as those typed by a human or pasted from an unknown source. The tool will then display an overall analysis of the document with such factors as the total time spent writing and the number of active writing sessions.

An Authorship report includes the full text of the document. Each section will be color-coded to show whether it was written by a person, generated or edited by AI, or pasted from an external source. An authoring replay will play back the text in the document, revealing how it appeared.

For students, Authorship will ensure the report or assignment meets the guidelines required by the teacher and provide objective data if the student is accused of AI-generated plagiarism. Early next year, the tool will also prompt students to cite any text from external sources.

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Other companies, including OpenAI, have launched or tried to launch their own AI detectors. However, achieving close to 100% accuracy has been a challenge. In 2023, OpenAI debuted and subsequently pulled its own AI detection tool because of low accuracy. Such tools have improved, though false positives and other flaws still creep in. Will Grammarly Authorship perform better than the rest of the pack? We’ll find out once it arrives next month.