There's a very common "style" to ChatGPT responses<sup>1</sup>.  If you start to use ChatGPT yourself, you'll quickly become familiar with it.  And ChatGPT *can be* a useful tool, if you keep in mind its limitations, so I do recommend that you try it, especially while it is free.

If you do suspect that an answer is generated by ChatGPT, you can then run it through the detector that [@ArturMeinild mentioned](https://meta.askubuntu.com/a/20239/618353).  However, the detector is not nerfect (pobody is), and can be (and has been) fooled.

Other indicators that increase the odds of an answer being from ChatGPT are:

* A new user who posts a "professional looking" answer as their first post.  That's not to say we haven't had some stellar first answers here, but for most users it takes some time to become *really good* at taking the time to *fully read and understand* the question, and to learn how to write a *really good* answer.

* An answer that mentions a particular setting, with a comment from the OP that they couldn't find that setting.  ChatGPT is *really bad* (or *good*, depending on how you look at it) about just "making up" settings or features that don't exist.  It appears to hate to give a "There's no way to do that" answer.

* A new user who posts multiple answers in a short span of time.  These answers may not even all be here on Ask Ubuntu.  Often, the user will create multiple answers across multiple Stack sites in a short span of time, on a wide-range of topics.  So if you *suspect* that an answer is ChatGPT based, look at other answers from that user, both here on AU and other SE sites.

    I came across an answer here on AU just last night that "sounded" ChatGPT'ish, but actually came up as "98% real" on the detector that @ArturMeinild mentioned.  But on further examination, I found 22 answers that the user had posted in 7 hours across more than a dozen Stack sites.  Fortunately (for purposes of "proof" at least), all of the other answers *did* test at a nearly 100% GPT rate or highly so.

* An answer that doesn't seem to actually answer the *question* that was asked, or skips key details from it.  Often, to get a "focused" answer, someone will just copy the question *title* (or a subset of the question) into ChatGPT.  The answer that is posted will seem "off", if you read it in context of the *question* that was really asked.

None of these *absolutely* means that the answer is ChatGPT-based (or AI-based), but each warning flag increases the odds.  And it's highly unlikely that a user is going to post just *one* ChatGPT answer.  Over the long term, I'm *hopeful* that we'll be able to spot the patterns above (and more) across multiple answers.

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<sup>1</sup> There are a few frequent users here who actually have that same style (and have had, since well before ChatGPT).  @karel, @rinzwind, and @NotTheDr01ds (err, yes, that's me) all often have a similar style to ChatGPT.  However, we always (in my experience) pass the "real" test on the Detector.

At this point, I commonly scan through the list of [new answers](https://askubuntu.com/search?tab=newest&q=is%3aanswer) in chronological order.  I can often spot potential ChatGPT answers just from the first few lines in the preview.  However, most of the time when @karel or @rinzwind answer, it often "triggers" my *sense* of a ChatGPT answer.  But it's clearly *not*, of course.

I've even started to read some of *my* answers when it took a split-second for me to realize that I'd written it, even though it initially sounded ChatGPT'ish.