Will my paper be flagged as AI?
You can find out before you submit rather than after, and the sections most likely to be flagged are predictable enough to check deliberately.
Most people meet a detection score after submitting, which is the worst possible moment, because at that point every option has closed. The score already exists. Looking at it earlier does not change what it says, it changes what you can do about it.
Here is what actually raises it on academic writing, and what to check.
Academic prose starts closer to the line than most writing
Detectors measure regularity. Papers are regular on purpose, which puts academic writing at a disadvantage before any model is involved.
Across our corpus, the standard deviation of sentence length within a document has a median of 8.7 words for pre-2020 arXiv writing, against 6.4 for generated text. Academic prose already lives nearer the generated end than casual writing does. Field conventions constrain vocabulary, structure is prescribed, hedging is expected, and every round of supervision and copy editing smooths a little more variation out.
None of that is a fault. It is what good academic writing is, and it narrows the gap a detector has to work with. Full version in AI detection in academic papers.
Some sections carry far more risk than others
Not evenly distributed through a paper, which is useful because it tells you where to look.
Methods is the highest-risk section in most papers. Formulaic by design, often reusing phrasing from the group's earlier work, deliberately narrow vocabulary.
Structured abstracts are short and templated, and short text is where every detector is least reliable.
Related work falls into a repeated shape fast. One citation per sentence, same rhythm throughout.
Introduction and discussion are usually the most varied and the safest.
A paper flagged mostly in its methods is displaying the property every methods section has. A paper flagged evenly throughout is telling you something about the writing as a whole. Those need completely different responses, and only per-passage scoring separates them.
Things that raise the score without any model involved
- Grammar checkers. Editing smooths prose, and smoothing removes the variation detectors
read as human. See does Grammarly get flagged as AI
- Writing in a second language. Learned English is applied more consistently, which reads
as more predictable. See why non-native English writing gets flagged
- Heavy co-author editing. Same smoothing effect, several times over
- Scoring the LaTeX source instead of the prose. Detectors that read your preamble as text
produce meaningless numbers. See why LaTeX breaks AI detectors
Checking before you submit
Run the paper, not the abstract. Longer text carries more signal and produces a more reliable number, and every detector is far better per document than per sentence.
Ours is free and unlimited with no account, takes .tex, .pdf and .docx, and scores each paragraph separately so you can see which sections carry the signal rather than staring at a single percentage. We publish our false positive rate: 0.8% at the public setting, 0.4% stricter, measured on pre-LLM academic writing.
Worth running a second tool too. Detectors disagree for structural reasons, and if two of them disagree sharply about your paper, that is worth knowing now rather than later. See why AI detectors disagree.
If a section does come back high
The edits that move a score are structural, not lexical. Swapping words for synonyms changes almost nothing, for reasons in why paraphrasing tools do not reduce detection.
What does move it:
- Vary sentence length. Follow a long qualified sentence with a short one. Strongest single
signal, and it costs you no meaning
- Cut the connectives. "Moreover", "Furthermore", "Additionally" at the start of sentences.
Measured on our corpus, 5.8% of generated sentences open this way against 2.4% of human ones
- Resolve stacked hedges. "May potentially suggest" becomes "suggests", or becomes a claim
with its limit stated
- Cut the restating conclusion, the closing paragraph that summarises without adding
Our rewriter does this at paragraph level, and it treats numbers, statistics, citations, DOIs and defined terms as protected, refusing any rewrite that would alter one. On a paper that constraint matters more than the rewriting does. See paragraph rewriting.
What the score is, and is not
A probability from a classifier with a measurable error rate. It describes how your writing reads. It carries no record of how the writing was produced, and no detector can recover that from words alone.