Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

For a human who deals with student work or reads job applications spotting AI generated work quickly becomes trivially easy. Text seems to use the same general framework (although words are swapped around) also we see what I call 'word of the week' where whichever 'AI' engine seems to get hung up on a particular English word which is often an unusual one and uses it at every opportunity. It isn't long before you realise that the adage that this is just autocomplete on steroids is true.

However programming a computer to do this isn't easy. In a previous job I had dealing with plagiarism detectors and soon realised how garbage they were (and also how easily fooled they are - but that is another story). The staff soon realised what garbage these tools are so if a student accused of plagiarism decided to argue back then the accusation would be quietly dropped.

How are you verifying you're correct? How do you know you're not finding false positives?

Have you tried reading AI-generated code? Most of the time it's painfully obvious, so long as the snippet isn't short and trivial.

To me it is not obvious. I work with junior level devs and have seen a lot of non-AI junior level code.

You mean, you work with devs who are using AI to generate their code.