Using Paperpal's AI Detector to Identify AI Written Sentences


Can AI Detectors improve Academic Writing?

Dear Scholar,

Almost everyone I speak to is using AI for academic writing. Some more, some less. To balance AI writing with understanding, I have developed the atomic sentence method and thought hard about the ethical implications. But after a few AI-enhanced writing iterations, it is hard to keep track of how much AI you actually used.

This is where AI detectors come in. These tools can help you gauge whether your writing relies too heavily on AI (and might be flagged by journals). They act as guardrails for ethical and responsible use of AI in writing. This week's article is on using Paperpal's newest AI detector to improve writing.

In this post, we run a few experiments: uploading purely AI-generated content, a paper of mine (generated using the atomic sentence method from the lit review course), and a pre-AI-era paper. While the Paperpal AI detector is not perfect, it does give you a clear trend of how much AI was used, and more importantly, which are the exact sentences that need improvement.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend,


Ilya Shabanov, The Effortless Academic

This is the weekly Effortless Academic Newsletter. It consists of an in-depth tutorial and additional events, promotions, or relevant information for the AI-curious modern academic. I strive to consistently provide value with every email. If this is not relevant to you, you can always unsubscribe from everything and will never hear from me again. If you find the email somehow inappropriate, please reply to me and let me know what you didn't like.

The Effortless Academic

Literature Review Tools, Note-Taking Strategies and AI tutorials for the modern academic. Publish more with less effort and supercharge your career.

Read more from The Effortless Academic

Tool Review: Consensus 2026 for Lit Reviews & Writing Phase Dear Reader, Academics who use AI for academic writing typically fall into two camps: Those who try to do too much at once, generating whole paragraphs, and those who only occasionally ask for small corrections. One is ethically questionable and produces poor-quality output, while the other leaves a lot of potential on the table. Both require a lot of manual editing and don't make you all that much more productive. Having tried both...

Tool Review: Consensus 2026 for Lit Reviews & Writing Phase Dear Reader, I am wrapping up writing my PhD thesis and am currently 3 months ahead of schedule, with two papers accepted and two more in review. This feels good, especially as I will be able to dedicate much more time to the EffortlessAcademic. I think most students could do this if they master what almost nobody does: The combination of digital notes + AI. Here is why: A digital note-taking system, helps learning and remembering...

New Effortless Writing with AI WebinarApril 11, 2026 (+ Recording) Dear Reader, It seems easy to "write with AI", but fairly quickly, you realise 99% of AI-written text doesn't actually meet academic standards. Typically, the text is vague, overly verbose, or just plain wrong. Maybe you've been there? I've had this experience as well, which prompted me to push AI to its limits, to build a system that is ethical, personal, fact-checked, and produces writing tailored to academic needs. My main...