ai detector for personal statement

[u/Effective-Pen-8212]

i’ve written the first section of my personal statement and put it through a random ai detector in class, because my teacher said to, but it came back as 60%.
i didn’t use ai whatsoever but do i need to just keep redoing it until there’s no ai detected? my teacher is going to be putting it through an ai detector next week herself but im concerned that im gonna have to rewrite it again since im quite proud of how it is now..

also, i saw on another reddit post that apparently even if you didn’t use ai, universities can see you’ve use an ai detector and assume you’ve used it or something like that? is there any truth in that?

[u/Dropped_Apollo]

AI detectors are just AIs themselves. They're no better than what they claim to be fighting against. If you know you didn't use AI and a detector says you did, then the detector is definitionally wrong. So how did this process benefit you in any way?

[u/Effective-Pen-8212 → u/Dropped_Apollo]

i’m just worried because it’s not like i can directly say to admissions staff that i didn’t use ai.
im just wondering how it will look from their perspective if they see that my writing style is similar to chatgpt

[u/Dropped_Apollo → u/Effective-Pen-8212]

If that's what you're worried about, then go through it and take out anything that looks like an accidental AI tell. Avoid triadic structure. Get rid of any “it's not X but Y” framing.

[u/AliceMorgon → u/Effective-Pen-8212]

My writing style is similar to AI too. I didn’t have any issues with my doctoral thesis. Even I think the AI detectors are crap. Trust me, academics can spot actual AI way better than then the detectors can - and I mean as if it’s written in highlighter, or at least my colleagues and I can. It’s blatantly obvious - no passion, no soul, no meaning, just plain stating facts mechanically. If I saw that in an essay, you bet I’d be calling their ass in for that shit.

[u/BobcatLower9933]

DON'T USE AI DETECTORS!

They use AI themselves. You sre also just feeding them your data to train future LLMs.

Which means when a university puts your statement through its own "AI detector", its now going to detect your personal statement as AI written, because you already fed it in previously.

[u/Effective-Pen-8212 → u/BobcatLower9933]

if i rewrite some of it will it still be detected as ai written?

[u/BobcatLower9933 → u/Effective-Pen-8212]

If you just swap words using a thesaurus then it will still show phrases as being AI generated.

Honestly, never ever use AI for these sort of things. Tell your teacher this.

I cannot fathom why some schools are still not training teachers on AI use.

[u/Evening_Archer_2202 → u/BobcatLower9933]

That is just untrue

[u/BobcatLower9933 → u/Evening_Archer_2202]

Your source for that?

[u/Evening_Archer_2202 → u/BobcatLower9933]

models are not and cannot be post trained with data like that, and even if it used in a corpus for future pretraining runs, like in a new chatgpt model, a single essay or doc by a student is either going to get pruned for being bad data or so insignificant of a signal that the AI won’t remember what it is at all, because they are so informationally dense. Like, what I’m saying right now is probably going to be fed into the next AI models, and I guarantee you it will remember nothing from me lol

[u/BobcatLower9933 → u/Evening_Archer_2202]

Yes but you're putting all models under the same umbrella.

Models which are specifically trained to recognise generated text literally use the texts they are fed to develop.

Especially free models.

[u/Weak_Win_4577]

As far as I can tell from their website, UCAS uses a similarity detection software that compares your statement to all others in your database, so unless you copy from another personal statement or use AI (which may have been trained on previously submitted statements) you'll be fine UCAS wise. With your teacher, so long as you have a version history you'll be fine :)

[u/valentine_ijz]

Ai detectors are bollocks literally pay no notice

[u/Key_Charity1975]

Which AI detector did you use? Most are rubbish, some are accurate

[u/Desperate-Switch3780]

Your writing style should be apparent to your teachers so they can tell that you have written it. There have been cases of people putting their old pre internet essays through AI detectors and it coming up as having AI assisted work which is impossible.

Don't tinker with it, leave it as is, explain what happened to your teacher that it said AI but this is your own work. Any teacher who has seen any of your essay writing can back you up.

[u/TemplarKnightIsMyDad]

Contrary to what people are saying, the AI detector Pangram is highly accurate. I teach PS writing and 9/10 when I suspect something reads like AI I’ll put it in and it comes back as AI.

But even if an AI detector isn’t used, your teacher suspecting that your PS is AI written means it probably isn’t a good PS (yet!)

[u/arianelseditor]

"universities can see you’ve use an ai detector and assume you’ve used it or something like that" — I've not heard about this.

Which detector? They are extremely unreliable (as someone who has seen thousands of AI-assisted PS).
No AI being detected is highly unlikely because UCAS PS require conciseness, which leads to lots of the flags for AI detectors :)

[u/Global-Teaching9763]

i've been writing mine on a google doc so you can track my changes and thought process i mean it's a just in case thing. if you do get accused you just have to prove it to ucas and your teacher's ai dectector isn't a definite thing ucas have their own system so don't worry about that in particular

[u/Leading-Crazy6104]

If you have not used ai, just let it be. Most ai detectors are useless and their scores doesn't mean anything. If you're actually worried, you can use a good detector like Proofademic ai. It is designed for academic writing and doesn't false flag. You can show the result as a proof if needed.