In today’s episode, you’ll discover why AI detectors are essentially useless, and how their flawed methodology leads to inaccurate and potentially damaging results. You’ll learn about the limitations of these tools and see a real-world example of how they fail spectacularly, even with historical documents. You’ll gain insights into why focusing on critical thinking skills is far more valuable than relying on unreliable technology. Finally, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge to challenge the misuse of AI detectors in education and hiring.
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for watching the video.
In today’s episode, let’s talk about AI detectors and AI detection. Let’s bring up the most advanced and reliable ChatGPT predictor in the world—according to their own marketing. Let’s put in some text and see how well it detects AI. Remember, this isn’t a plagiarism detector; it’s an AI detector. Was this text generated by AI? Plagiarism is different. Let’s detect the text.
96% AI generated. Wow. That’s incredible. What’s the text? The Declaration of Independence—written 246 years before ChatGPT. AI detectors are a joke. They’re garbage. Their accuracy is less than a coin flip. This is a very confident assessment from the self-proclaimed most advanced and reliable AI detector on the market—246 years before ChatGPT existed. I put in a document we know was human-written. Now, either space aliens, Skynet, or someone sent a Terminator back in time to write the Declaration, or this thing is just broken. It is just broken.
Why does this happen? Why are we getting this result? A couple of reasons. First, AI detectors—most on the market—use a relatively small number of metrics, two of which are well-known: perplexity and burstiness. These metrics judge whether a document is AI-generated. Perplexity is the variance in language; more variety means the tool is less likely to think your text is AI-written. Burstiness considers things like line and paragraph length—if everything is evenly spaced, the tool thinks it’s AI-generated.
Why would it think the Declaration of Independence—obviously not machine-generated—was AI-written? If we look at the section listing complaints against England, we see a lot of similar line lengths. That’s going to get picked up. There are also many similar words and tokens. The phrasing—”He has done this, he has done this”—is repetitive. An AI detector will flag this repetition, concluding it must be AI-generated. It’s a very specific kind of document.
Second, many detectors use primitive metrics and straightforward, fast, and cheap code, or they use very small language models—again, fast and cheap. As a result, they’re not very capable; they’re kind of dumb. They may have been trained on purely generated texts, learning characteristics like perplexity and burstiness. All of it is worthless. AI detectors are worthless; they are garbage. Show this example; show this video; run the test yourself. I originally posted this on LinkedIn, and I got a lot of feedback. Many people said their kids were suspended from school or put on academic probation because schools used these tools as gospel, claiming academic integrity violations. No, the tools are garbage. Stop using them. Educational institutions should stop using them, period. They’re worthless.
I saw another comment on the LinkedIn post about someone turned down for a job because their resume and cover letter were flagged as AI-generated. The hiring manager, using a detection tool, concluded the applicant wasn’t real and didn’t offer the job. This has real-world consequences because someone is using a tool they think is good, but it’s not. It’s garbage. If you are a parent, use this example to show your school board and school administration how worthless these tools are. If you’re at a company and the HR person or hiring manager is using one of these tools, tell them to stop immediately because they’re worthless. They’re no good; they’re less than a coin flip in accuracy. To judge whether something’s AI-generated, flip a coin—you’ll get better results mathematically.
Are there giveaways that something is AI-generated? Yes, but fewer every day as models advance. They get better as they’re trained and tuned, and the big tech companies making AI models have far more budget, technical capabilities, and people than those making AI detectors. So, the models are accelerating far faster than detection abilities.
What’s the solution? Two things. First, does AI detection matter? Does it really matter whether a student wrote the paper or wrote a good prompt to generate it? If it matters that the student wrote it, ask yourself why. You want them to be able to think; writing is thinking. There are other ways to measure that. Ask students questions in class; debate points and see how much background knowledge they retain. Let’s not bother with term papers—it’s a waste of time. Machines can write better term papers than humans. Let’s do things like Socratic debates. Framingham State University, near my house, has students write papers with ChatGPT, then critiques them in small groups, identifying errors, overgeneralizations, and areas for improvement. This reinforces critical thinking, which is what you want to teach—you want students to think. That’s powerful.
A second use case where AI detection might matter is copyright. To assert copyright, you must demonstrate human involvement; purely machine-generated content can’t be copyrighted. How do you do that? Show the content’s lineage and provenance; keep records; maintain an audit trail. If you absolutely have to prove you made something, keep an audit trail. When I work for a client and use AI, I start with a voice memo, transcribe it, apply the client’s style guide using AI, and give them the final product. I can show the chain of evidence—original recordings, etc.—and say it’s machine-assisted but human-led. Because it’s a derivative work of my original human-led work, it retains copyright, and I can assign it to the client. That’s a way to handle copyright. Finally, stop using AI detection for stupid use cases—like disqualifying someone from a job for using AI in their resume or CV. That’s a dumb application of AI. Why? Because you want maximum productivity from your employees. Analyzing them for AI use is stupid unless you specify in the job description that AI use is prohibited. Even then, there are better ways to address this that don’t involve broken, incompetent detection tools.
If you are using, considering using, or know a colleague using these AI detector tools, please show them this, share it with them, and persuade them that these tools are worthless, garbage, and unreliable. They should under no circumstances be used for anything important, such as a student’s academic standing or job hiring. This is your public service announcement. Thanks for tuning in. Talk to you next time. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button, subscribe to my channel if you haven’t already, and hit the bell button to be notified when new content is live. Thank you.
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Christopher S. Penn is one of the world’s leading experts on AI in marketing. Christopher Penn has over a decade of AI experience in classical AI, regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI. Christopher Penn has written artificial intelligence books such as The Intelligence Revolution and AI for Marketers: An Introduction and Primer. Christopher Penn is an AI keynote speaker around the world.
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