Did AI Write the Declaration of Independence

Recently author Adam Kay ran some of his writings through an AI checker, and it was determined that almost 30% of it was written by AI. Clearly that was incorrect since it was written a decade ago before GenAI was available.

Others followed up with their own experiments, and got similarly amusing results. One even found that AI has determined that 99% of the Declaration of Independence was written by AI.

I guess I’m an AI apologist, and feel this kind of headline grabbing news is a bit unfair to the AI checker. We all know that GenAI models are trained on large amounts of existing data to imitate its training data, so old text like the Declaration of Independence is used to train the model, and the model can imitate the style of the Declaration of Independence. This makes it harder for AI checkers to distinguish between what AI produces and what AI is trained on. One may argue that AI checkers should recognize well known and old texts, and classify them correctly, but that would be a very long list of texts to recognize, and it’s not the main goal of the AI checkers which is to classify whether newly written text, often by students, is AI generated or not.

Some people argue that due to the inclusion of well known literature in the training corpus, texts with more sophisticated vocabulary and grammatical structure are more likely to be classified as AI generated. For example, this post is written without AI, and the Grammarly AI detector says it has 0% AI generated content. While the result is accurate, I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or an insult to my writing.