No. I was completely baffled by your questions, but I think I now understand. Someone once upon a time fed the Declaration of Independence into an AI-detector and got a false positive, and you're saying that this means that all putative AI-detectors are "no better than astrology".
First, I think it's worth distinguishing "had a false positive once" from "is no better than astrology".
Second, once it occurred to me that there might have been a famous false positive on the DoI, one of the first things I found in a web search was a lengthy discussion from the makers of Pangram (generally, I think, considered the best of them) about (1) why some AI-detectors think the DoI was AI-written and (2) why their software, which allegedly works a different way, doesn't.
I gave it a try. It was a couple of years ago that "look at these stupid AI detectors rating the DoI as AI-written" thing did the rounds, so they've probably all made sure that specific thing doesn't happen any more. So I tried a 100-word chunk of the US Constitution. (100 words because that's what you get per "credit" and I wanted to try it on some other texts too. The last two paragraphs of section 3 are 103 words and the last three words can be removed to leave a coherent sentence, so that's what I used.) It said: too short to classify with certainty, but 100% "possibly human". "High" confidence, whatever that means.
Well, maybe they fudged the DoI and thought to fudge the Constitution while they were at it -- in fact, maybe they do something like searching the web to check for possible human authorship. So my next test was a passage from a (printed) book, recent enough not to be in Project Gutenberg or the like, obscure enough that it's unlikely that people are quoting it a lot. ("Lessons from an Optical Illusion" by Edward Hundert, a paragraph from page 111. I had to truncate it a bit to fit into 100 words.) Once again: too short to be sure but 100% "possibly human", "high confidence".
Maybe they do have that book in some big internal database. So, next test: another printed book, but this time make some changes so that the text I give the detector doesn't exactly match the text of the book. This time I picked a novel by Charles Stross. ("Quantum of Nightmares", page 116 of the edition I have.) I changed names, synonymized words, and restructured sentences. Too short to be sure, 100% "possibly human", high confidence.
Maybe they just rate everything "possibly human". I asked Claude (Sonnet 5.5; I don't have a paid sub) to write me a couple of paragraphs of urban fantasy "a little in the style of Charles Stross". The chunk I gave it was 103 words and I decided not to mess with the text despite the extra 1 credit it would cost me. (I didn't want to take a _much longer_ chunk lest that introduce a bias -- maybe shorter pieces of text are more likely to be rated "possibly human".) 100% "possibly AI", high confidence.
My prompt to Claude had produced something thematically consistent with the original Stross, so I took ~50 words from its next paragraph along with ~50 words from Stross, again with serial numbers filed off by me. "46% of this text is possibly AI", quoth Pangram. It put the boundary exactly where it actually was. It says "low confidence" for the likely-AI bit and "high confidence" for the likely-human bit.
He would, but he keeps hitting his weekly limit. /s Seriously though, you would think they would have the (agentic) resources to do better QA on their flagship product. Not a week goes by without some kind of regression.
Another example of "More AI, worse app" is amazon.com for me lately. Alexa AI Chat keeps showing whenever I scroll up on the amazon.com mobile page. I don't want Alexa to search for products. Worst thing is, I can't close it. The "X" button just isn't doing anything. So the only way out of it is to refresh the page and avoid scrolling up ...
This has been going on for at least 1 1/2 months by now, and I wonder if it'll ever be fixed.
Then hopefully at some point they get to experience the consequences of having low quality thresholds, and perhaps then their quality thresholds will increase.
There are plenty of areas where a "low bar" is more than enough. "low" doesn't necessarily mean bad here, it can simply mean "not the best".
I would argue the majority (in the true sense of the word) of white-collar service work does not require an expert.
It requires someone who has reasonable qualifications in the given field, and the motivation ($) to help you with your task.
So no one needs a top-shelf $900/hour lawyer to draw up a basic low-stakes contract where both parties agree to all the terms as written. You just need someone to ensure that the contract is legally valid as written.
Appreciate the feedback on my writing. I never let Claude add its own opinions or interpretations to what I write, but I do use it for improving the clarity of what I want to say. Problem is that I enjoy the way Claude (Opus 4.6, Fable) writes and I'm unintentionally starting to adopt its style so the line is starting to blur.
I get it, it's easy to ask it to just touch up the language and split run ons. At this point in time, I'm of the opinion that "improving the clarity" at the cost of creating "a discernible style" is not a good trade off.
In most formal publications of The Before Times like newspapers and magazines, you did not want much of a writer's specific tone to come thru bc the organization had its own writing style. We used to value "correctness" because too much variance (without intent) made things hard to read—it was like context switching and came with a cost.
Nowadays though, so many people are already reading Claude writing day in and day out. I would venture to say that the opposite cost is being incurred now, where as soon as I start to see the same language patterns, some attention mechanism in my brain just starts to drift off. I literally cannot mentally focus on reading when the prose is 1:1 the same distribution as Claude. Some kind of fatigue happened by reading its output over and over day after day at work.
Anyway, just think about changing it up if you're interested in writing (even if it means your output is "sloppier").
Thanks for flagging this. From what I can tell, it's Beehiiv's locale detection overriding my publication settings, nothing I can change but will file a support ticket with them.
So I understand that the title is a bit inflammatory, but there's a whole section on exactly this, "Am I the Karen Now?". I'm never rude to a rep - they're just following a script to get paid. However, I don't extend any courtesy to the company's AI support bots optimized for stalling and maximizing profits.
Having being on the receiving end of many walls of AI-generated slop. I stand by every message I send, read it thoroughly, and keep it short and precise as to not add to the slop pile.
That's fair. I respect that you scrutinize everything you send and aren't needlessly hostile. I'm less optimistic that most other people who realize they can do this will do the same, and I worry that we'll soon be incentivizing companies to abandon customer service entirely.
Granted, the total is a bit of a reach as "disputes". The bulk of it was IRS + insurance claims. The rest were companies not giving me what I very clearly paid for.
A year with only a $3 problem in it sounds nice, honestly.
