I woke up to articles in my queue – YAY!! Or is it? These were article topics that were in my niche, and good paying too. I was excited. If you’re in freelancing right now, you know it’s tough. A lot of freelancers have left the industry and gone back to whatever they were doing prior to becoming a freelance writer. I’ve managed to hang in there, but it’s still pretty hairy. And honestly, even I was looking for a part time job a few months ago to try and get one or two days in a week at any retail establishment within walking distance. No one is hiring, and if you’ve been looking for a job, you probably know that too. But let’s dig into why AI checkers are complete bullshit.
The Article Instructions
Write an article on X involved topic about SEO and metrics and attracting visitors from Google searches in this specific industry and use these 15 keywords.
That’s yikes already, because SEO is a moving target, and the Internet advice for that moving target hasn’t really changed in 20 years. Although, I did find some new stuff last week. I may dig into that in another article.
The instructions go on to say: We will run this article through GPTZero, and if you score “above” (They said “under”, and I don’t believe that’s what they meant. GPTZero goes by percentages. The higher the percentage, the more of the content is supposedly AI generated.) 15 percent, we’ll request a revision.
But, I could really use the money, so I hopped on over to GPTZero to see if this is one of the more accurate ones or not. Surprise! It’s one of the worst ones for AI detection accuracy, and it only lets you check up to 5,000 CHARACTERS, if you don’t PAY PAY PAY PAY. That’s about 600 to 700 words. This article needed to be over 2,000 words, so I not only have to run that article through several grammar checkers and plagiarism checkers, I have to run it through GPTZero 4 to 5 times, and probably more because it thinks everything is AI generated. All of this turns a three-hour project into two days and numerous rewrites that will probably destroy the content as I fight to get it down to 10 percent. Does the money offered pay for 2 days? No, and I’m going to show you why.
My First Post on My Monitor Issues
We'll start with my post on my monitor issues. This is basically a diary or journal-type post, written in first person. I'll start here because this should be 0%.
That one says 3%. Okay, that would pass the 15% metric, but it's 100% human written. I checked the first 3,000 characters, which is basically the first 2 paragraphs. However, this is a post that's written almost entirely in first person, and you're not going to see that for professionally written content. At least, you don't see it very often.
Let's Try the Article on ISBNs. There's not as much I I I I I I I I in That one.
The article on ISBNs gets a 2%. Hmmm. Very interesting, but this still isn't an article that I would submit to a paying client.
Let's check a professionally written article. Unfortunately, I don't have anything I can share on this one because this was a piece that was paid for, but I can tell you that the topic was insurance.
Insurance articles get about 50 percent AI generated all day long. It just is what it is. I'm surprised it's that low, because when I was initially checking articles, insurance articles usually got a 95 percent.
GPTZERO - GIMME GIMME GREEDY GREEDY for Inaccurate Answers
I'd check more, but GPTZero thinks they deserve money for their inaccurate results, and I'm not going to pay them a dime, but here's the other problem. I checked four or five articles in total, which actually amounts to about 3,000 words, and I'm out of free credits. So, there's a good chance that this would have happened as I was checking the possible article for suspected AI. If you're wondering how much they want, it's $10 a month * 12 or $120 upfront. Not happening. The article I was thinking about writing only paid $110, so it's not paying for that membership. I'd be out $10. that's right. Writing this requested article would net me -$10 for 2 days of work. the best-case scenario is that I'd net $0 after two days worth of work because I'd drop it the minute GPTZero stopped working, but I would still be out two days where I could have been earning real money.
And let's not forget the bottom line - None of the articles I checked were written with AI, so even 3% is too much. As an aside, I did check a drug addiction article, and it got 97 percent AI detected, so it's really hit or miss as to what this thing thinks is AI-generated, and rewriting those suspected AI sentences can result in a degradation of the work. It happens with basic plagiarism checks too. This is because the writer used the best words the first time. Now, they have to change those words because someone else used them in that exact order. That's the perils of this industry. The client doesn't always get the best content due to all these checkers and having to pass these parameter checks,. but that's the nature of this industry. What I do know is that I can put whatever I want on my website without checking more than grammar. That's one of the benefits of having your own website and writing your own content.
