Ok this is driving me crazy. i write for a few different blogs and started using grammarly premium last month for the grammar and clarity suggestions. pretty standard stuff right
but i noticed something weird. my original draft scanned fine through detection tools. then after accepting grammarly’s suggestions (mostly clarity rewrites and sentence restructuring), the same piece flags way higher for ai content
like were talking 30% ai before grammarly and 71% after. on the SAME article. the only changes were grammarly’s suggested rewrites
so basically… using a grammar tool to improve my writing makes it look more like ai wrote it? i feel like im going insane. anyone else noticing this or am i paranoid
Not paranoid at all. this is actually a known issue in the seo world. grammarly (and similar tools like hemingway, wordtune etc) tend to normalize text toward a certain pattern - shorter sentences, active voice, clear structure. guess what ai also does? exactly that
ive had clients come to me panicking because their content got flagged after professional editing. the ironic thing is that better writing = more likely to be flagged as ai. kind of broken
this is a real problem for anyone producing content at scale. i manage content for 3 different sites and we use grammarly across the team. never even occurred to me that the editing itself could cause detection issues until one of my writers flagged it
what ive started doing is running detection AFTER editing, and if it flags high, i manually rephrase the flagged sections with more of my natural voice. its ridiculous but it works
Honestly this whole thing makes me question what “ai content” even means anymore. if a human writes something and then a tool suggests changes and the human accepts them… is that ai content? where do you draw the line
autocorrect rewrites my texts all the time. spellcheck has been a thing for decades. at what point does “tool assisted” become “ai generated” because it feels like we’re moving the goalposts
@RustyCircuitX thats exactly what i suspected but couldnt articulate. the normalization thing makes total sense. grammarly is literally training everyone to write the same way
@EchoDust_7 right?? like if my phone autocorrects a word is that ai content now lol. the line is so blurry
This connects to something i see with my students too. the kids who use grammarly on their essays tend to get flagged more than the ones who dont. which means the students trying hardest to write well are the ones getting accused of cheating. the irony is painful
Update: talked to my editor about this and she had no idea grammarly could cause detection issues. She’s rethinking the policy now. Small win.