The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail

The detector is just the chatbot's twin. Stop pointing it at our students.

This post follows my standard early access schedule: paid subscribers today, free for everyone on June 9.

I am frustrated. Very frustrated. And I need to vent a little, so bear with me.

Over the last few weeks, the use of AI detectors has been pushed back into the spotlight. It appears to have started with Pangram and its relentless marketing, which claims the company’s tool is accurate enough to reliably identify text that is AI-generated or even AI-assisted. But as I argued in an earlier essay, this is pure fiction.

Suppose the detector really hit the 99.98% accuracy Pangram advertises, a figure I doubt holds up anywhere outside a laboratory. Even then, two in every ten thousand texts would be falsely flagged as machine-written. But students don’t submit just one essay across their school years. They hand in a great many, term after term. So the share of students who would get falsely accused at least once climbs well past that headline number, even at an accuracy rate that sounds almost flawless.

An accusation of an academic integrity violation is not a small thing. It can and often will follow a student well beyond the assignment and the course, into the rest of their academic life. It is literally a career-threatening accusation. Turning AI detectors into a surveillance system in the classroom thus does actual damage to the mental health of the young people in our care.

I have been an educator for over thirty-five years. Whatever I teach, and however I teach it, I have always believed that the well-being of my students sits at the center of my work. Nothing justifies harming them. Absolutely nothing. I sincerely hope this is not a controversial position.

Let me be as direct as I can, so that everyone can hear me.

If you decide that the constant threat of a false, life-altering accusation is a fair price for your honest students to pay so you can catch a handful of cheaters, then whatever is happening in your classroom has stopped having anything to do with education. No academic integrity standard is worth doing that to a human being.

The story that broke a prize

Another reason AI detection is back in my feeds has a rather unlikely origin.

In May, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, run out of London by the Commonwealth Foundation, announced its regional winners and published the stories in Granta, the British magazine that has carried serious fiction for decades. The Caribbean winner was a story called The Serpent in the Grove, credited to a Trinidadian writer named Jamir Nazir. Judges loved it. The panel chair, the novelist Louise Doughty, praised its restraint and quiet authority. And the Caribbean judge, Sharma Taylor, called its voice melodic.

Then the internet got hold of it.