(Maybe you are basing that claim on something more than vibes. If so, show your work! What tests did you do? What were their results?)
(Maybe you are basing that claim on something more than vibes. If so, show your work! What tests did you do? What were their results?)
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.
I'm sure Pangram is foolable (see e.g. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/how-to-produce-a-pangra...) but 5/5 unambiguously correct results seems significantly better than astrology to me.