What is an example of burstiness?

Burstiness is a metric that captures how varied the structure of a piece of writing is. Elements like sentence length, sentence structure, and changes in word use impact burstiness. 

An example of writing with low burstiness is as follows: “I have a dog. My dog’s name is Tim. Tim looks a bit scruffy. Tim’s ears stick out. Tim likes to go for walks.”

Compare this with an example of writing with high burstiness: “I have a dog. His name is Tim, and he’s a scruffy little character with ears that stick out sideways like broken antennae. Tim lives for walks—whether it’s a quick trot around the block or a long ramble through the park.”

AI-generated text often has lower burstiness than human writing. Burstiness is therefore used by tools like QuillBot’s AI detector to guess whether something was written by a person or an AI.