AI detection tools – inspecting work or increasing work?

One of my clients recently contacted me because she had found some AI-written content in one of my documents. She has been using my services for the past few years through her postgraduate and doctoral studies and, in this time, I have written and edited several documents for her. She recently passed one of my documents through an AI detector and found some of the content to be flagged as AI-written.

I was shocked because I never use complete paragraphs generated by AI in any of my client documents, an important reason being that I know how stringent AI detection tools can be.

Like a professional service-provider, I promised her that I would take care of it and asked her to send me the document. I quickly scrolled to find the flagged content and, to my surprise, it didn’t seem familiar to me. The first thought that came to my mind was that the client may have inserted that bit of content in my document. So, I went back to my client folders and searched for the document in question. When I found it, I saw that I had written it in 2020, which was why it seemed unfamiliar to me.

The funniest part was that the content was written before any of the AI platforms were launched and/or gained popularity, for instance, ChatGPT was launched in November 2022 and Gemini was launched in February 2024. Even Jasper AI, one of the first writing assistants, was launched in February 2021.

I showed her the evidence, saying that even if I had wanted, I could not have used AI to actually write the content because it was not available at the time when the document had been written.

She was shocked too, but what could we do? Alas, the bane of AI for academic writers!

Long story short, I had to change the flagged content, because, believe it or not, we are merely robots controlled by AI!