AI Detectors Find the Devil’s Work: Writers, students, engineers face false accusations of using AI

Last month, the Haiti-born, Quebec-based author Thélyson Orélien won a prestigious literary prize for C’était ça ou mourir (It Was Either That or Die), his French-language novel about a teacher forced to flee Haiti’s gang violence. Within hours, an anonymous X account accused Orélien of using AI to write the book. One of the people behind the account, who was later revealed to be a columnist at the French newspaper Le Figaro, had run it through Pangram, a widely-used AI detector. “Wouldn’t it have been more honest for the author to credit their co-author?” the post read. Four days later, France’s top literary award, The Prix Goncourt, dropped the book from contention.

The fear: For the past few years, writers of all kinds, from students and academics to journalists and novelists, have been managing accusations of passing off AI-composed prose as their own. These “witch hunts,” as many writers call them, place the burden on the accused to prove their innocence. Meanwhile, accusations of AI use can rapidly tarnish reputations and result in loss of work, failing grades, or worse. What if these writers are just the beginning? What if anyone could find themselves tied to a stake for writing with AI?

Horror stories: Detectors have improved dramatically from a few years ago, when their accuracy was wobbly and they regularly misidentified writing (particularly by non-native English speakers) as AI-authored. Still, false positives and false negatives regularly occur, and detectors have a hard time properly classifying fully artificial sentences from those where a human used AI in a minor role. Non-white authors are also accused of AI reliance (and traditional plagiarism) at higher rates than their white counterparts.

• Orélien isn’t the only prize-winning Afro-Caribbean author whose work has been flagged by Pangram. Last spring, University of Pennsylvania professor Ethan Mollick posted on Bluesky that Pangram’s tests said that “The Serpent in the Grove,” a short story by Trinidadian author Jamir Nazir, was 100 percent AI-generated. Mollick was motivated by his gut check: “Pangram flags at 100% but also, come on, if you know you know,” he wrote. After further tests, a Pangram researcher wrote that three of the five regional winners of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize appeared to contain AI-generated text. In response, the Commonwealth Foundation conducted an investigation of its own and cleared the winners after reviewing their working drafts and time-stamped documents. However, Granta, the literary magazine that had published the winning stories, announced that it would break ties with the organization.
• AI detector verdicts aren’t always unanimous. In addition to Pangram, GPTZero also pointed fingers at Orélien’s novel, and two researchers told The New York Times they believed AI had been put to use on the prose. But when news agency Agence France Presse ran the account’s flagged passages through other detectors, the results split: InVID-WeVerify, a tool AFP helped build, judged them very probably human-written, as did two others, while a fourth put the odds of AI at 100 percent. Nevertheless, on October 17, Orélien’s publisher said he had abandoned his efforts to prove that his novel was untouched by AI.
• Publishers are getting cold feet in the wake of AI detector results. In March, Hachette pulled the horror novel Shy Girl after The New York Times reported on evidence of AI use. Back in January, Pangram CEO Max Spero had posted on X that he had found AI in 78 percent of it; author Mia Ballard later told the Times that an editor she hired added the AI prose. In July, according to Bloomberg, novelist Jerry Falade lost a $2 million book deal for his debut crime novel Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body partly because of a Pangram finding. Falade, a PhD student at Southern Methodist University, denies using AI.
• Schools have acted on detector scores more quickly than companies recommend, and students are fighting back in court. Turnitin, a detector used in academia, says its AI-writing indicator shouldn’t be the sole basis for action against a student. Yet Adelphi University ruled that a student had cheated with AI after Turnitin scored his history essay as 100 percent AI-generated; in January a New York court annulled the finding, ruling that the university had mishandled the case. 
• Under the European Union’s AI Act, AI providers must make sure their outputs are marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated. In August, Anthropic said new Claude models would embed a statistical watermark in the text they generate. The company explained that a detected watermark shows Claude was likely involved; however, it can’t reliably distinguish text Claude wrote from scratch and original text Claude helped edit, leading to some subscribers canceling in protest. OpenAI followed suit in October, saying it would watermark ChatGPT text in the EU. According to OpenAI’s tests, replacing 25 percent of the words for synonyms reduced detection of passages with 400 tokens from about 92 percent to 17 percent.

How scared should you be: Quite a bit, if you’re a native English speaker hoping to pass off generated prose as 100 percent original. The consequences are real: Authors are losing millions of dollars in book deals because of AI accusations. However, Pangram and other AI detectors still aren’t as reliable in non-English languages and regional dialects, which makes the accusations against Orélien and other global authors problematic. Pangram’s Spero admitted to Times reporters that no independent study has confirmed Pangram’s false-positive rate in French. And even if Pangram’s numbers did hold up, the X account that went after Orélien stretched them too far, according to subsequent calculations by mathematician Mouhamadou Sy. The reading public and some publishers have also begun to push back against these accusations, with growing success.

Facing the fear: Even the people who make AI detectors say you shouldn’t let a confidence score decide a case all by itself. It’s just one eval; drafts and time-stamped files tell a fuller story. But legitimate AI use in support of a writer’s work is not witchcraft, just as using spellcheck or a calculator is not cheating. Not every field has the same standard for original work, and standards shift as technologies change. Machine-detectable watermarks may help establish the truth, but until everyone broadly agrees on a distinction between AI-written and AI-assisted, it’s likely that the puritan urge to uncover more offenses will continue.