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Wikipedia publishes list of AI writing tells [1]

['Grant St. Clair']

Date: 2025-08-20

A ramification of the AI "revolution" that I hadn't even considered before now is what it must be doing to Wikipedia. As the broadest and most accessible repository of human knowledge on the planet, I can only imagine how much it must have been flooded with AI slop by well-meaning tech bros who genuinely think ChatGPT is an omniscient genius.

To combat this, Wikipedia has put out a list of signs of AI writing for use by aspiring editors, but it's also immensely useful for anyone doing online writing in any capacity. It's not just a list of guidelines — it's an early-warning system to keep encroaching AI at bay and celebrate human creativity. (Sorry, sorry, I had to.)

Signs of AI writing should be treated as signs of a potential problem, not the problem itself. While, on a superficial level, they can be analyzed as problems in and of themselves, most are quite trivial and easy to fix (excessive boldface, poor wordsmithing, broken markup, citation style quirks, stray text, et cetera—nothing special). Do not treat these signs as the whole problem; they potentially point to an underlying issue with LLM-generated content that carries policy risks that are an order of magnitude more serious. The hardest cases are those where obvious signs are absent because the LLM-generated text is polished enough to hide surface defects while dire internal problems persist. Depending on the circumstances, it may be unwise to remove the outward signs without also addressing the underlying problem as referred to in the previous paragraph.

The list is worth a skim, and could keep you from getting fooled in the way described here.

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/08/20/wikipedia-publishes-list-of-ai-writing-tells.html

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