If you're writing or reading content, you know how important it is to only work with the best of the best. So many factors go into writing – you have to verify the accuracy of facts, check references and citations, and make sure that the content is original. If you hire writers to produce articles, you'll also want to ensure they're not producing boilerplate, AI-spammy content.
While not all AI-written content is bad, sometimes you want to learn the origins if where something came from. You can't prove anything is 100% written with AI, but you can use tools like Originality to help predict things.
Personally, I don't really pay much attention to AI detection tools unless it says something is 100% AI (which doesn't happen too much). These detectors are great to check if someone just copied ChatGPT and pasted it right into a document. Other than that, make sure to take everything with a grain of salt.
What Is Originality?
With the recent AI boom, I spent a few days researching the best solutions to check if something was written with AI. After hiring a couple dozen writers for personal side projects on sites like Upwork, I needed to check the authenticity of their work. Something that checked for AI while also letting me know if any of the writers copied their content. I originally used Copyscape for plagiarism and GLTR for AI, but it just took too much time. Originality combined both of these.
Working as both a comprehensive plagiarism & AI content detection tool, Originality allows you to easily check the uniqueness of text by comparing it against public-facing web content while running it through an AI checker. Originality is the first & only current content detection tool on the market that makes use of GPT 4, OpenAI's newest AI language model.
As of April 10th, 2023, Originality released their GPT-4 & precision update, claiming the tool is now
- 99% Accurate on GPT-4
- 83% Accurate on ChatGPT (GPT-4 powered)
- 95% Accurate on AI Created & then Paraphrased (QuillBot)
The following image shows some statistics about the newest Originality accuracy ratings, based on the recently released Originality case study. A few of the newest highlight points include
- Improved Chat GPT detection
- Partially trained on GPT-4 content
- The only tool that claims to be capable of detecting Paraphrased content. With this release, paraphrasers like QuillBot don't seem to be as accurate
- A reduction in the number of false positives with increased training on human-generated content

Originality ensures that your time isn't going to waste when working with plagiarized or AI-generated content; it also allows for the detection of potential copyright problems, so you don't get caught in any legal trouble resulting from using someone else's intellectual property.
AI detectors are getting better and tools like Undetectable AI have taken off, paraphrasing writing to pass detectors like Originality 100% of the time. When testing writing with Originality, you'll see a percentage determining if something the odds that text was written with AI. The tool will also provide the link to pages it finds plagiarism violations on.
Who Should Use Originality?
Tons of people could benefit from introducing Originality to their workflow. Some industries and careers that come to mind are:
Bloggers – As a blogger, it's essential to produce original and engaging content for your readers. Not only is it important for building a loyal audience, but it also helps establish your credibility and authority in your niche. Bloggers can use Originality to ensure they're not using low-quality, AI content on their site. This works really well if you're trying to check pieces submitted from external writers. Some writers pass of AI-written garbage as their own, and expect site owners not to notice it.
Educators – As an educator, you know how important it is to uphold academic integrity in the classroom. But with the abundance of information available online, it can be challenging to ensure that your students are submitting original work. Originality can be a valuable tool for checking student-submitted content and verifying its originality. Simply upload the document in question to quickly and accurately identify any instances of plagiarism or AI-generated work. By using Originality, you can help create a culture of honesty and fairness in your classroom and foster a positive learning environment for all your students. It would be really unfair if some students got away with AI-generated content while others got lower marks for genuine submissions.
Students – As a student, it's essential to produce original and authentic work to succeed academically. But with the abundance of information available online, it's easy to accidentally plagiarize without even realizing it. Originality can be a valuable tool for students looking to verify the originality and authenticity of their work before submitting it for a class or assignment. Not only can it detect plagiarism, but it can also identify if AI tools were used in the creation of a document. Students using Originality can be confident that their work is completely original. This can save time, stress, and potential consequences – all while helping students succeed in their studies.
Journalists/Editors – If you frequently edit content that you don't necessarily write, Originality could lift some stressful weight off your back. Being able to quickly run a quality assurance check across the content you work with could potentially save you hours validating content.
Web Designers & Publishers – Search engines like Google don't like spammy & low-quality content. Running copy through Origiainlity could ensure the new landing page you're about to publish doesn't seem like every other ChatGPT-generated description about web development!
Website Flippers – And lastly, if you're in the business of buying and flipping websites, this could be massive for you. Originality is even planning on releasing a "check entire site" feature in the next few months. Ensure the site you're about to invest time and money in is organic, free from plagiarism, and contains unique human content.
How Accurate Is It?
Based on 20 checked articles, Originality was able to identify GPT-4, GPT-3, and GPT-3.5 content with almost 100% accuracy. When taking ChatGPT-generated content, accuracy drops to 90% at its lowest detection rate.
I always try to stay vigilant in mentioning how AI detection is not something explicitly measurable. This entire process works on predictions, so you really should only use these with a grain of salt. If you are trying to determine if a writer used AI, this tool would be best used to check content over a period of time (10 articles from the same author). This would give you a better indication than a 1-off analysis.
Originality seems to result in false positives more than false negatives (it will sometimes detect human content as being AI-written, but AI-written content usually comes back as AI). After testing academic content to complex ChatGPT responses, I'd say ...

You can pretty easily detect ChatGPT content!

I tested high school to graduate level content and got 90%+ original reviews. Academic content is a lot more complex and nuanced, so it makes a lot of sense seeing results like these:

Highlightable Features
The best products don't always have to reinvent the wheel, rather optimize it. While Originality does include the most advanced industry-level AI checking on the market (since it's based on the newest OpenAI models), it kind of just optimizes your work. Why go back and forth between a bunch of websites when you can get everything ran through one?
Check For AI Content & Plagiarism Line By Line
The biggest feature is AI detection. According to case studies, Originality can detect the AI on all text generated by GPT-4, GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and ChatGPT an average of 99.41%. GPT-3 had the highest maximum average score of 99.95%, followed by GPT-3.5 at 99.65%, and ChatGPT coming in last at 98.65%.
Not only with Originality return the percent likely writing has been created with AI, but you can now view exactly which lines come back the most suspicious. Here's what I mean:
You can see the AI predicted text is highlighted in red, while the human estimate is shown in green.

This also applies to plagiarized text. Anything suspicious will highlight in pink. As you can see, it found the exact text from this review! Pretty impressive. It seems to be crawling web content quite frequently (or even live for that matter).

Content Readability Checker
Originality recently introduced a readability checker which aims to give you more information about your content score, stats, reading level, etc. This tool is completely free and is great for testing the level of writing you or your contractors have been producing.
You'll see text highlighted in different colors based on their syllable count. It looks like I should revisit the ones in red and update a few things... You can also see a grade level based on the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level scale. My sample was written at a 12th grade level, so if I wanted to target the average American grade level I would reduce certain words and syntax structures to fit a 7-10th grade level.

Fast Chrome Extension
The team recently released a Chrome Extension that lets you 1-click check content for both plagiarism and AI across any website. The extension has features including:
- One-Click AI Detection inside Google Docs
- Watch the Writer Write (its actually a little creepy)
- See Who Contributed to an Article
- See a Table Showing Writing Sessions and Characters Added
- See a Graph Showing Characters Added vs Time
The best feature about Google doc integration is the multiple writer support. Now you can easily see if a writer:
- Pasted in content from ChatGPT or another source and only made minor edits
- Had other writers work on the articles specifically assigned to them
The extension is specifically useful for those who work with writing as part of their daily workflow.
No More False Positives (For Writers)
If you are a writer and are concerned about false positives or the need to defend that your work was actually created by you, this can help. This update provides you with the ability to show that you created the document yourself.
No More Uncertainty with Clients (For Content Marketing Agencies)
You can arm yourself with the ability to ensure you are only getting articles that have been human created. There's no more accusations of writing coming from a robot (not that it would be likely without proof anyways).
Confidence In What You Are Publishing (For Web Publishers)
If you want to be sure what you're putting out into the world doesn't seem like AI – here's your confidence score. You don't need to stress about having a site getting picked up as low-quality, AI content.


Scan Entire Websites
This is super, super cool. This feature was released very recently and allows you to run full content audits scanning an entire site for AI. I've tested this out on our blog and it shows the word count & originality percentage the page ranks by. Hopefully in the future plagiarism support will be added, as this would be a wonderful tool for detecting the authenticity of a websites content origin. This does use a lot of credits, it used about 600 and scanned 142 pages. I found the $6 equivalent to scan the site to be a pretty reasonable deal. I don't see myself needing to scan an entire site more than once a year. Once they add plagiarism checks, it'll be great.

Easily Manage Your Team
On the website, you can add team members as part of a shared account. This is great for companies like publishing agencies, academic institutions, and web design firms. Each team member also gets a reporting dashboard that shows all of their AI and Plagiarism checks collectively. You can also view the activity they've completed on their accounts.

Pros & Cons
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Originality Pricing
The tool costs $0.01 per 100 words to scan (equal to 1 credit). You also pay as you go, there's no obnoxious or predatory recurring pricing model. When you need to buy more credits, you just need to buy more credits! When checking your content you can decide whether to check for plagiarism, AI, or both (using 2 credits per 100 words). Current credit purchase options are as follows:
$20: 2,000 credits
$50: 5,000 credits
$100: 10,000 credits
$250: 25,000 credits
$500: 50,000 credits
Where Can They Improve?
Since the product came out fairly recently (last November), it's still in a fairly early stage of development. It works and that's ultimately the most important thing that matters – but there are a few tweaks I'm looking forward for the team to fix over the next few months.
Firstly, the UI/UX is a bit wonky. The recent content scans could be organized in a better format & the AI detection score screen could look a bit prettier. When I first started using it, there was a slight learning curve where I needed to understand how to check something as fast as I can.
Lastly, they only support English! You'll have to wait a bit longer if you want to check content in another language.
Although for an early product, everything else works pretty well! They even offer API access if you're a developer looking to use this in the background of another project.
Meet The Founder
We sat down with the founder of Originality, Jon Gillham, to talk about how & why he created the tool. Hear about his future plans, goals, and what he has in store:
Should You Use Originality?
I would recommend it! I use it almost daily. I don't use the plagiarism checker as much as I run AI tests, but I've seen great success with both. The only thing to keep in mind is to never put your full reliance on a single tool for testing content (or anything for that matter). Also, if something does get flagged as AI, take another look into the writing to see if you can pick up on any patterns yourself. Originality is a great tool to have in your content editing arsenal, and it's pretty affordable! Whether you’re a writer, academic, or web developer, Originality is worth a try.
Here's what it had to say about this article:

Originality FAQs
Does Originality.ai Offer a Free Trial?
Not really. You can get 10 credits for free when installing their Chrome Extension, but you don't get any free credits on the actual website version.
Does Originality.ai Offer a Lifetime Deal?
No, you have to purchase credits each time you want to check content. Gold Penguin readers can get 25% off credit purchases when using the discount code 25Penguin
at checkout after signing up through our link!
What Type of AI Can Originality Detect?
Originality.ai can detect content created by GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-J, GPT-Neo, and ChatGPT.
Is There a Word Requirement When Testing Content?
Yes, you need to enter at least 50 words to check for AI. When using the chrome extension, you need to select at least 100 words.
Does Originality Help Change Content Detected as AI?
No. They just offer plagiarism and AI detection. They don't actually help you change content to become undetectable.