AI text detection is a dead end; provenance and verification are the only path forward
shashib · x · 2026-08-20
Commenting on Adam Albright's Washington Post piece: LLM text detectors are doomed — models improve faster than detectors, and current tools already flag careful human writing, non-native English, and formal prose as "AI," while watermarks can always be stripped.
The deeper problem is cultural: just as we never demoted Word-printed documents in the 1990s, we should assume nearly all professional text will be AI-touched. The distinction that matters is not "was a model involved" but "can the origin and accountability be trusted."
For high-stakes content — medical, financial, official statements — the solution is stronger provenance: cryptographic signatures, authenticated channels, and machine-checkable watermarks. Most scams would fail that test.
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