I had to change my mind on AI detectors after playing around with it.
It would be interesting to hear how this detector compares. It also seems to be aiming for low fp rate.
FYI this is all relatively new so there might be lots of issues and iterations coming.
* pre-chatGPT is not an effective control because language evolves. In the arxiv corpus in particular there are "fashions" in research depending on what gets funded lately, not to mention many new words and topics not invented before a given paper.
* In general, detecting AI from content seems difficult as humans write like they read. To the extent there are unique factors recognizable as AI and to the extent humans read them, they will eventually incorporate them into their writing style. Accordingly, you'd need to model a rolling window of "AI tells" that decay at some rate.
What I mean is, are there statistical differences in how people write that would give similar looking results between say 1990-2000 and 2000-2008? Are we just detecting the natural progression of language here?
The biggest results: in Jan of 2026 about 39% of papers got flagged as AI written. In computer science speicifcally the peak was at 65%. Mathematics barely moved away from 0.7%, though the proof heavy math texts might just not get picked up by the detector properly.
All this is a detector estimate of a statistical signal and not a proof any given author used AI. Machine written can also mean heavy AI-assisted editing.