AI Detection Tools Are Too Unreliable to Trust

Academic papers, hiring managers, and educators are making consequential decisions based on detection tools that contradict each other and flag plainly human work as AI-generated—a technical failure that's now becoming a compliance liability. Institutions are institutionalizing hair-trigger rejection of legitimate human writing, punishing anyone with a clear, direct style or non-native English speakers whose writing patterns don't match detector training data. This creates perverse incentives where writers optimize for detectable humanness rather than clarity, tanking the quality of prose across academia and professional communication.