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.

I did engineering at a university, one of the courses that was mandatory was technical communication. The prof understood that the type of person that went into engineering was not necessarily going to appreciate the subtleties of great literature, so they're course work was extremely rote. It was like "Write about a technical subject, doesn't matter what, 1500 words, here's the exact score card". And the score card was like "Uses a sentence to introduce the topic of the paragraph". The result was that you write extremely formulaic prose. Now, I'm not sure that was going to teach people to ever be great communicators, but I think it worked extremely well to bring someone who communicated very badly up to some basic minimum standard. It could be extremely effective applied to the (few) other courseworks that required prose too - partly because by being so formulaic you appealed the overworked PhD student who was likely marking it.

It seems likely that a suitably disciplined student could look a lot like ChatGPT and the cost of a false accusation is extremely high.