“Scarlet Cloak and the Forest Adventure”: a preliminary study of the impact of AI on commonly used writing tools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper explores the growing complexity of detecting and differentiating generative AI from other AI interventions. Initially prompted by noticing how tools like Grammarly were being flagged by AI detection software, it examines how these popular tools such as Grammarly, EditPad, Writefull, and AI models such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing Copilot affect human-generated texts and how accurately current AI-detection systems, including Turnitin and GPTZero, can assess texts for use of these tools. The results highlight that widely used writing aids, even those not primarily generative, can trigger false positives in AI detection tools. In order to provide a dataset, the authors applied different AI-enhanced tools to a number of texts of different styles that were written prior to the development of consumer AI tools, and evaluated their impact through key metrics such as readability, perplexity, and burstiness. The findings reveal that tools like Grammarly that subtly enhance readability also trigger detection and increase false positives, especially for non-native speakers. In general, paraphrasing tools score low values in AI detection software, allowing the changes to go mostly unnoticed by the software. However, the use of Microsoft Bing Copilot and Writefull on our selected texts were able to eschew AI detection fairly consistently. To exacerbate this problem, traditional AI detectors like Turnitin and GPTZero struggle to reliably differentiate between legitimate paraphrasing and AI generation, undermining their utility for enforcing academic integrity. The study concludes by urging educators to focus on managing interactions with AI in academic settings rather than outright banning its use. It calls for the creation of policies and guidelines that acknowledge the evolving role of AI in writing, emphasizing the need to interpret detection scores cautiously to avoid penalizing students unfairly. In addition, encouraging openness on how AI is used in writing could alleviate concerns in the research and writing process for both students and academics. The paper recommends a shift toward teaching responsible AI usage rather than pursuing rigid bans or relying on detection metrics that may not accurately capture misconduct.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".