How Turnitin Flags AI Content (What It Really Detects)
Bywordy•1/7/2026
Turnitin does not detect AI tools directly. Learn how Turnitin flags AI-generated content, what patterns it analyzes, and why false positives happen.
There is nothing in the text you generated that would contain a hidden watermark that clearly shouts “AI! Chatgpt! Gemini”. Turnitin and other AI detector tools are probability based. It evaluates how much the patterns that your text contains correlate with the patterns of machine generated text.
Below the different parameters that the Turnitin are taking into account before your memoir mentor, teacher or even google, flags your content as AI-generated.
Highly predictable text
AI text is too statistically smooth. From the surrounding words, it is very easy to deduce what the next word choice is. Natural text will invariably present original choice of words, change of tone.
Uniform sentence structure
AI sentences have around the same length, same rhyme. Usually, the pattern of the sentences between themself is very balanced.
- Intro -> clarification -> exemple -> conclusion
Balanced tone and Lack of opinions
AI avoids strong opinions, present balanced sides to any question. The tone is simply too uniform. The choice of vocabulary will never mingle professionalism and casual talk or casual talk with familiar ones. AI tends to simply be too consistent.
High coherence with low specificity
The sentences tend to be perfect from a grammar point of view and often flow perfectly. The only issue? They lack content. Details, personal experience, specific examples, anecdotes, are rarely included in machine generated text.
Lack of stylistic fingerprints
The content that is produced by AI often sounds like it could have been made by anyone else. Your brand, the specificity of your voice is often erased by AI. To keep your own voice, your content should maintain idiomatics usage, specific expressions that you might have created and that your readers know, your personal quirks …
In general all of these parameters, if isolated, are not leading to a specific conclusion from Turnitin. What causes the flagging is the accumulation of all of these specific AI habits.
False positives can still happen! Using Grammarly or simply rewriting your paragraph with AI to improve its flow can lead to flagging. Non English speakers are also often targeted as their vocabulary might be more restrained and their usage of the language more wooden.