Wikipedia

Wikipedia:Help, I've been accused of AI!

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Suppose someone posts a comment on your talk page accusing you of using AI, or tags an article you edited as likely containing AI-generated text.

Take a moment to look over the comment or tags and think from the accuser's perspective. They are pointing to things you may be uniquely equipped to explain. There are many ways to respond, some of which are helpful and some of which will make you look bad.

What to say

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Yes

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If you used AI to write the content you added, then admit it. Most people will be much more willing to engage constructively with you if you tell the truth.

However, an even better approach is to disclose that you used AI in your edit summary. Disclosure at the time of publication is the minimum standard required by most reputable publications and scientific journals; it's not an unreasonable thing to ask.

No

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If you didn't use AI, you can deny the accusation. There is literally no reason not to tell the truth.

Consider, however, whether you used AI without being aware of it. Grammarly, for instance, makes calls to OpenAI under the hood for most of its rewriting functionality, as well as its "writing suggestions." Microsoft has integrated Copilot into many of its applications, including Microsoft Word and Notepad. Translating with an AI tool may lead to embellishments in the translated text.

If you didn't use AI, you tell the truth, and the person accuses you of lying about it, then see Wikipedia's guides to resolving disputes and responding to personal attacks.

What not to say

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Dismissals

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"You have no proof!"

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Correct. Unless there are blatant giveaways that would make the article eligible for speedy deletion, the only person with proof of whether you did or did not use AI is you. Wikipedia is not a court of law, and editors are not prosecution attorneys. If you want proof, provide it yourself.

"This AI detector says this isn't AI!"

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Even the best AI detection software cannot divine with perfect accuracy whether your writing was generated by AI. However, you can. Saying this just raises the question of why you need to use an app to tell you what you, yourself, did, and why you are hiding behind this secondhand information.

"AI detectors don't work!"

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While AI detection software is not perfect, it is much more reliable than laypeople think; the best ones are accurate more than 99% of the time.[1] When they do get it wrong, it's more likely to be a false negative—[2]i.e., claiming that a piece of writing was written by a human instead of AI, not vice versa.

More to the point, though, this is only relevant if someone actually used one of those detectors. Many people, including the creator of this essay, don't.

And even more to the point, this doesn't answer the question of whether you used AI.

"Whether I used AI doesn't matter as long as the content is good."

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No matter how good AI-generated text may look to you, it may not be as good as you think it is, even if the AI chatbot you're using assures you that what it gives you does adhere to Wikipedia's standards or give a "surgical teardown" of another editor's arguments against you. AI-generated text typically has substantial problems (e.g. original research, synthesis of information, ficticious references, etc.), so if text appears AI-generated, that means it might have at least one of those problems.

"Humans can write like this!"

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Yet again, this doesn't answer the question whether you, specifically, did use AI (you may sense a running theme).

It's theoretically possible for humans to write like AI; anything is possible. A monkey randomly mashing keys could, statistically speaking, produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. However, in the entire evolutionary history of monkeys, none of them actually did. Similarly, the linguistic characteristics of AI-generated text are things that simply did not appear very often in the many centuries' worth of text that humans actually wrote, and then, almost immediately, started to appear everywhere after 2023.[3]

This holds true even when comparing the same kinds of text, e.g., formal academic writing by humans versus formal academic writing by AI. It even holds true when comparing AI-generated text from the base language models—i.e., based only on the training data humans provided, with no changes after the fact—to text generated by chatbots available to the public. These things especially did not show up en masse, repeatedly and formulaically, in the same piece of writing. Think of the Fermi paradox: if there are so many people out there writing like AI, then where are they?

This is also the case on Wikipedia. There are more than 1 billion edits to Wikipedia, going back more than 25 years, and yet out of those 1 billion edits, very few of them show the linguistic characteristics of AI-generated Wikipedia text that became ubiquitous after 2023.

"You just think it's AI because of the style, tell me a real problem!"

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That's just it. Writing styles associated with AI can be a real problem because text written in such styles has the tendency to appear promotional, misrepresent sources, and contain hallucinated citations.

Excuses

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"I use AI to organize my thoughts / fix text for grammar, style and clarity!"

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Oftentimes, when an AI chatbot is asked to help "organize" its user's thoughts or fix text to ensure that it is grammatically correct, adheres to Wikipedia's style guidelines, and is understandable to readers, it might insert new text that says things that differ from what you may have meant to say when you wrote your original text.

Even if your unassisted comments aren't perfect or well-organized, we still prefer for you to produce content and comments manually so that you can spot errors and other things to improve as you go. If the content you introduce to an article happens to contain a few imperfections, other editors might come along and correct those later. That doesn't give you an excuse to keep introducing errors though, but using AI to fix or "refine" them may cause other problems as well.

"But English isn't my first language!"

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If English isn't your first language and you are unable to contribute or communicate effectively in it, you should go edit an edition of Wikipedia in a language that you are more fluent in. Using an AI chatbot to translate text is discouraged for similar reasons that using an AI chatbot to fix spelling, grammatical and stylistic errors is discouraged.

"There are no policies against AI use!"

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While there isn't strictly a policy, there is a guideline. You may read the relevant guideline at WP:Writing articles with large language models, but a brief summary follows.

Except for basic copyediting or translation, you should not use an LLM to write content; doing so is considered disruptive. Articles whose first revisions contain strong indicators of having been entirely AI-generated may be speedily deleted under criterion G15, and comments containing strong indicators of being entirely AI-generated may be struck or collapsed via {{collapse AI top}} and {{collapse AI bottom}} per WP:AITALK.

If you try to use a generative AI tool for basic copyediting or translation, you have to make sure that the information in the text you want to add matches what the cited sources say, that all of the citation details are accurate, and that you wouldn't be introducing statements that have been made up by the tool itself if you published your edits. Prompting an AI chatbot to check or modify (i.e. "refine") its own output so that it "sounds human" (at least to AI detectors) or adheres to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines is generally not effective, even if the chatbot confidently tells you that what it gives you does adhere to them. It is much better to manually write content yourself in your own words.

Depending on which LLM you use, consulting it for Wikipedia-related advice may be a bad idea, especially if you're using ChatGPT, which is known to repeatedly misrepresent Wikipedia's policies and guidelines.[a]

Diversions

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"Revised the article to address concerns about "large language model" tone"

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The "concerns" are about whether you used AI. Therefore, the actual way to "address the concerns" is to say whether you used AI. If you did use AI, then the article requires much more than a superficial edit for "tone."

Comments like these frequently show up to accompany revisions that are themselves done by AI, which just exacerbates the problem. Using AI to "fix" AI does not fix anything.

"Let's focus on improving these articles instead of making accusations."

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Dismissing an accuser's concerns and telling them to focus solely on improving articles doesn't address the issues you may have introduced with your editing.

Although both humans and LLMs make mistakes, we have a right to be concerned about AI use in particular because LLMs can generate multiple paragraphs in seconds, so if you paste lots of AI-generated text onto Wikipedia, you might leave lots of issues in your wake that other editors would have to spend lots of their time cleaning up, and pasting even more AI-generated text while they're trying to clean up after your earlier messes would make them feel like Sisyphus.

Other

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"What parts of this sound like AI?"

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This doesn't answer the question of whether you used AI; whether or not this is your intention, it makes you sound like you are mostly concerned with covering your tracks.

If someone suspects that some of your contributions are AI-generated, asking them which specific passages gave them that idea so you can happily fix them doesn't properly address their concerns. AI-generated content on Wikipedia tends to contain other issues besides tone or style, such as hallucinated citations or other mistakes we wouldn't expect a human to unintentionally make. It's better to write content manually so you can better notice and fix problems as you go. That way, you can save us the trouble of cleaning up after you or telling you what needs to be fixed.

"If any text appears AI-generated ..."

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Making statements that start with something along the lines of "If I used AI..." makes you sound like OJ Simpson. Either AI was used or it wasn't. If you created a draft or added content that appears AI-generated, you should be able to recall whether or not the content you introduced actually came from an AI language model (and if so, which one) or was "refined" by a grammar checker, word processor, or other tool you used that has such a model integrated into it.

"Your accusations are uncivil!"

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If someone accuses you of using AI, you should assume good faith and give an honest explanation about your editing. Accusing them of incivility is generally not a good way to respond to them.

Any AI-generated response

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There are established guidelines on Wikipedia that strongly discourage AI-generated comments on talk pages. This is because people don't want to hear from an AI chatbot. They want to hear from you.

It's also generally a bad idea to try to hide your AI use by using more AI. Most chatbots have a strong and recognizable "speaking pattern"; just as people can recognize the voice of Gilbert Gottfried, Fran Drescher, or Miss Piggy, people can recognize the voice of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other large language models. Chatbots also tend to produce many of the poor responses detailed above, along with other things.

If you are accusing someone of AI usage

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If you are accusing someone of AI usage or asking them if they used AI to write the content you came across, make sure to provide evidence for a specific diff or section. Understand that asking if an edit is AI may inherently be seen as an insult or attack, even when it is not, and provide relevant guidelines and information around AI usage.

Even in clear-cut cases of AI usage, try to provide empathy especially if an editor is inexperienced. Many editors may feel insecure about their writing skills. Assure the editor that their own words are far more valuable than AI-polished words.

Notes

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References

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  1. ↑ Russell, Jenna; Karpinska, Marzena; Iyyer, Mohit (July 2025). "People who frequently use ChatGPT for writing tasks are accurate and robust detectors of AI-generated text". Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics: 5342–5373. arXiv:2501.15654v2. doi:10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.267. ISBN 979-8-89176-251-0. Archived from the original on 11 March 2026. Retrieved 16 March 2026.
  2. ↑ Robinson, Matt (2 December 2025). "Do AI Detectors Work Well Enough to Trust?". Chicago Booth Review. University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Archived from the original on 4 May 2026. Retrieved 28 May 2026. All three commercial tools kept false positive rates below 1 percent, with Pangram's the lowest—essentially 0 across most decision thresholds. False negative rates were higher, coming in between roughly 0 percent and 2 percent for GPTZero and between 2 percent and 4 percent for Pangram. Originality.ai's false negatives were higher still: between 10 percent and 40 percent, depending on the model.
  3. ↑ Juzek, Tom S.; Ward, Zina B (19 January 2026). "Why does ChatGPT 'Delve' so much? Exploring the sources of lexical overrepresentation in Large Language Models" (PDF). Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics. Archived (PDF) from the original on 12 March 2026. Retrieved 16 March 2026.

See also

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