[HOT TAKE] Is Winston AI or GPTZero more accurate?

Is Winston AI or GPTZero more accurate? The short answer is GPTZero. The longer answer is the devil lies in the details. Keep reading to know more about it.

Why GPTZero has a better overall accuracy?

GPTZero has much more famous than GPTZero and it shows why. Winston AI’s detection capabilities also seem limited compared to GPTZero. We tested 160 texts in total—82 were AI-written, and 78 were human-written. GPTZero’s overall accuracy stood at 90.63%, while Winston AI’s came in at 79.38%. You can see this vividly on the bar chart where GPTZero’s bar (~90.6%) towers over Winston AI’s bar (~79.4%).

Also Read: Is Winston AI Accurate Like Turnitin?

Data and methodology

We compiled these 160 texts and recorded for each one whether it was actually written by AI or by a human (this is the ground truth). Then, we ran both GPTZero and Winston AI on these texts. We stored their decisions—i.e., whether each detector labeled a text as AI or human. We also stored their scores:

• GPTZero score goes from 0–100%. Higher means more human-like, so 100% is definitely considered human by GPTZero.
• Winston AI score starts from 0 for AI and goes to higher values for texts it considers more human.

Hence, if a text is actually written by AI but gets a high Winston AI score, Winston AI is basically labeling it as human. This is not at all meant to say Winston AI is bad, but it is definitely less accurate based on this particular dataset.

Also Read: How Accurate is GPTZero Compared to Turnitin?

Confusion matrices (what did each detector guess?)

• GPTZero
  • Actual AI texts: 68 times it correctly said AI, 14 times it incorrectly said human.
  • Actual Human texts: 1 time it incorrectly said AI, 77 times it correctly said human.
• Winston AI
  • Actual AI texts: 54 times it correctly said AI, 28 times it incorrectly said human.
  • Actual Human texts: 5 times it incorrectly said AI, 73 times it correctly said human.

One way to see it: GPTZero missed 14 AI texts and mislabeled 1 human text, whereas Winston AI missed 28 AI texts and mislabeled 5 human texts. Both detectors are more likely to mess up AI text than to incorrectly label a human text, but Winston AI misses AI-written content almost twice as much (28 vs 14).

Recall by Class (how good is it at “catching” the right label?)

• GPTZero
  • AI recall: 68 out of 82, or around 83%. That means it caught 83% of the AI texts correctly.
  • Human recall: 77 out of 78, or about 99%. Almost all human-written pieces were labeled correctly.
• Winston AI
  • AI recall: 54 out of 82, or around 66%. That means it only caught 66% of the AI texts.
  • Human recall: 73 out of 78, or about 94%. It did a decent job with human texts, but still not as good as GPTZero.

So basically, GPTZero is better at catching AI text and is also a bit better at recognizing human text.

Score distributions and why that matters

We plotted each detector’s score in boxplots. GPTZero’s scores for AI texts are mostly clumped around 0, though there are some weird outliers that go up to 100, while human texts stick tightly around 100. This means GPTZero’s scores look clearly separated between AI and human in most cases.

Winston AI, on the other hand, shows a much wider overlap. AI texts sometimes get high human-like scores, which makes Winston AI more prone to mislabeling. That’s the main reason Winston AI’s overall accuracy isn’t as high.

The Bottom Line

GPTZero is more accurate than Winston AI based on this dataset. GPTZero achieved a 90.63% overall accuracy, whereas Winston AI managed 79.38%. GPTZero also picks up 83% of AI texts versus Winston AI’s 66%, and GPTZero recognizes almost all human texts (99%) compared to Winston AI’s 94%. So if you’re trying to detect AI content in a mix of random texts, GPTZero is clearly the more reliable option.

One more thing which I would like to add is that AI detectors and all these testing scores are still in an ongoing race. Winston AI might catch up in future updates, but for now GPTZero is winning the accuracy game. You can definitely use Winston AI if you want, but it is not at all meant to outperform GPTZero for this task as of now.