Meanwhile, the leading commercial tools for plagiarism detection often flag properly cited/annotated quotes from sources in your text as plagiarism.
On the other hand, an opaque LLM detector that just prints “that was from an LLM, methinks” (and not e.g. a prompt and a seed that makes ChatGPT print its input) essentially cannot be proven false by an author who hasn’t taken special precautions against being falsely accused, so the bar for sanctioning people based on its output must be much higher (infinitely so as far as I am concerned).
Nearly everything doesn't give 100% accurate results. Even CPUs have had bugs their calculation. You have to use a suitable tool for a suitable job with the correct context while understanding it's limitation to apply it correctly. Now that is proper engineering. You're partially correctly but you're overstating:
> A tool that gives incorrect and inconsistent results shouldn’t have any part of a decision making process.
That's totally wrong and an overstated position.
A better position is that some tools have such a low accuracy rate that they shouldn't be used for their intended purpose. Now that position I agree with it. I accept that CPUs may give incorrect results due to a cosmic ray event, but I wouldn't accept a CPU that gives the wrong result for 1/100 instructions.
The whole silly concept of an "AI detector" is a subset of an even sillier one: the notion that human creative output is somehow unique and inimitable.
It can be used for some decision (i.e. not critical ones), but it should NOT be used to accused someone of academic misconduct unless the tool meets a very robust quality standard.
> this tool is as reliable as a magic 8-ball
Citation needed