Someone posted recently about nearly failing a college course because an AI detector flagged their entirely human-written paper. Seven pages, ten citations, written over several days. One sentence got flagged because it started with the word “studies.”

I’ve been sitting with that for a bit, because it’s a genuinely awful situation that’s going to keep happening to more people.

The core problem is this: AI detectors are statistical tools dressed up as evidence. They measure how predictable a piece of text is, based on patterns from training data. Clear, formal, well-structured academic writing happens to look a lot like AI output, because AI was trained to imitate exactly that. So the better you write, the more suspicious you look. That’s not a minor flaw. That’s the mechanism working exactly as designed, producing exactly the wrong outcome.