SPECIMEN #010: Detectus pseudoscientificus (The Algorithmic Witchfinder: Or How to Sell Someone a Problem, Then Charge Them to Make It Worse)

Classification: Pseudoscience Merchant / Digital Protection Racketeer / Moral Panic Profiteer Habitat: University plagiarism policy pages, Reddit moderation tools, editor submission guidelines, browser extensions installed by people who have read one alarming article about ChatGPT Diet: Institutional anxiety, academic fear, and the persistent belief that a number generated by an algorithm is more reliable than a pair of functioning eyes Threat Level: To students, to writers, to anyone who constructs a clear sentence, and to Charles Dickens, who is 95% AI according to at least five separate detectors and has been dead since 1870 There is a detector. It analyses text. It produces a number. The number tells you how much of the text was written by artificial intelligence. The number is wrong. Not occasionally wrong. Not wrong in edge cases. Systematically, demonstrably, hilariously wrong, in ways that would be funny if universities were not using the results to accuse students of…