Burstiness

See also: AI text, AI content and AI content detectors

Burstiness or text burstiness refers to the pattern of sentence length in written text. Humans tend to write in a bursty fashion with short and long sentences interspersed, while machines tend to write uniformly with mostly sentences of the same length. GPTZero primarily detects this difference. To measure text burstiness, one looks at the probability distribution of sentence length. A neat, uniform probability distribution indicates a computer-generated text, while a messy, inconsistent distribution suggests human writing.

Writing content with high burstiness, along with high perplexity, is the main method to avoid being flagged as AI generated content by AI content detectors like Originality.AI, GPTZero and the OpenAI AI Text Classifier. See the full guide about how to write articles to be undetectable by AI content detectors.

Explain like I'm 5 (ELI5)

Burstiness is like when you talk a lot at once and then become quiet for a while. It's how humans naturally write and express ourselves. So when we talk continuously at the exact same pace for a long time, AI content detectors will think that we are robots.