AI in Education

AI Writing Detection Tool Uses 'Forensic Linguistic' Techniques to Check Authorship

• By David Nagel
• 03/07/23

FLINT Systems has released what it describes as the "first linguistic tool designed to detect whether a document was authored by its attributed author." The system is designed not simply to detect whether a piece of writing was authored by an AI, but whether it was written by the person claiming authorship at all.

To do this, according to the company, the system "applies forensic linguistic methodologies to create a digital linguistic fingerprint of an individual's writing style. It then creates a linguistic fingerprint of the document at question and compares the two. Testing results showed that when documents were created by anyone other than the individual who submitted the document, FLINT Systems correctly identified in over 80% of the cases."

This "fingerprinting" approach, according to the company, distinguishes it from other AI writing detection tools like GPTZero becaue it eliminates the potential errors in detection that occur when AI-written content is edited by a human.

According to the company: "By applying linguistic fingerprinting technology, the FLINT System can correctly identify when an individual did not author the document, regardless of whether or not there are elements of humanly developed texts interwoven into the AI document."

A free trial of the system is available. In a test case, I compared one of my articles with three other articles I'd written, and it determined that the article in question was 50% to 55% likely to have been written by me. (It was written by me — although, as in the case of this article, it did contain quotes from other people.)

The free trial, which requires registration, is available at free.flintai.com/home. To use it, upload some documents from a single author. The click the "Compare and Analyze" button to upload a document to compare against the previous documents.

Further details about the product; additional modules, such as threat detection and demographics; and academic and enterprise licenses can be found at flintai.com.