AI Detector Fails to Distinguish Between Human and Machine Writing

A recent incident has highlighted the limitations of AI detectors in distinguishing between human and machine-generated writing. A screenshot circulating on social media showed an AI detector scoring a passage from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as 99% AI generated, despite being pulled straight from Project Gutenberg’s public-domain text without any paraphrasing or tricks. The excerpt was Victor Frankenstein waking to the sight of his creature by candlelight, and no one needs a literature degree to see the joke here - a novel about reanimating dead flesh from spare parts getting mistaken for a machine.