When someone fed the 1776 United States Declaration of Independence through an AI detection national letter, what happened can be described as almost comical: it was rated roughly 98%-99% “AI-generated” even though it was handwritten with a quill centuries before computers were even around (the classification was first reported in a write-up on Pop Inquirer).
It’s a wild result - but when you drill down into how many AI detectors do work, it sort of makes painful sense.
Many of these lean on statistical patterns such as “perplexity” and burstiness – in pith, whether a piece of prose feels predictable or “model-like.”
Anything that polished, formal and logically organized – including original human writing, as I recently argued in an analysis – can be flagged.
That’s more than a tech hiccup. It’s a troubling development for anyone who uses these tools for legitimate purposes: students handing in essays, writers doing meaningful work or organizations attempting to verify authenticity.
There are known instances where perfectly human work is flagged in error, no matter a person’s good will.
In other words – the A.I. detectors aren’t magic lie-detectors. They don’t comprehend meaning or context.
They just look for patterns. And if you write well – historically, formally or just carefully - that could end up getting you tagged as a “fake.”
As one commentator stated, if not even the Declaration of Independence can make it through unscathed, why should anyone feel secure depending on these tools?
So if you’re using an AI detector now – or considering it – perhaps treat the outcome as a clue, not a sentence.
Bottom line: there is no machine that can substitute for human judgment when it comes to words that matter.