<p><span style=”font-weight: 400;”>A funny experiment on the internet has now turned into a full-blown debate. A Reddit user uploaded the original 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence into an AI detection tool, probably expecting a harmless laugh. Instead, the detector decided that the centuries-old document was 99.99% AI-generated.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span style=”font-weight: 400;”>The same document was written before electricity, before computers, and definitely before ChatGPT. Within minutes, screenshots went viral across social media. And suddenly everyone started asking: if a historic document can fail an AI check, can we actually depend on AI detectors at all?</span></p>
<h2><strong><span style=”color: #ba372a;”>AI Detectors’ Accuracy:</span> Are AI Detectors Reliable Today?</strong></h2>
<p><span style=”font-weight: 400;”>The first takeaway from this incident is clear: the accuracy of AI detectors is not something we can completely rely on. These tools scan writing for patterns like repetition, predictability, or formal sentence structure.&nbsp;</span></p>
<blockquote class=”reddit-embed-bq” style=”height: 500px;” data-embed-height=”739″><a href=”https://www.reddit.com/r/AgentsOfAI/comments/1p6frmx/an_ai_detector_just_flagged_the_1776_declaration/”>An AI detector just flagged the 1776 Declaration of Independence as 99.99% ai-written. Millions of professors use this tool</a><br />by<a href=”https://www.reddit.com/user/buildingthevoid/”>u/buildingthevoid</a> in<a href=”https://www.reddit.com/r/AgentsOfAI/”>AgentsOfAI</a></blockquote>
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<p><span style=”font-weight: 400;”>The issue is that the writing style from the 1700s naturally had long, dramatic, and structured sentences. Back then, that was normal.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span style=”font-weight: 400;”>But to a modern AI detector trained on casual 2024 English, that style looks &ldquo;too perfect&rdquo; and therefore &ldquo;too artificial.&rdquo;&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span style=”font-weight: 400;”>So instead of seeing a historic founding document, the tool assumed a chatbot wrote it. The mix-up shows how quickly AI detectors can misjudge texts that don&rsquo;t match current writing habits, including creative pieces, poems, academic essays, or anything written under stress during exams.</span></p>
<h2><span style=”color: #ba372a;”><strong>AI Detectors’ Reliability In Education &amp; Journalism</strong></span></h2>
<p><span style=”font-weight: 400;”>This raises a bigger concern about AI detectors’ reliability, especially as schools, colleges, journalists, and workplaces start depending on these tools more and more.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span style=”font-weight: 400;”>AI detectors are useful, but they are not the final proof of whether something is AI-generated or not. They can easily label real human work as fake.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span style=”font-weight: 400;”>That means a student could get wrongly accused of cheating, or a writer&rsquo;s original article could be flagged for no valid reason.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span style=”font-weight: 400;”>Technology will continue to grow, but humans still need to stay alert and think for themselves.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span style=”font-weight: 400;”>Just because a tool gives a result doesn&rsquo;t mean it&rsquo;s the ultimate truth, especially when the same tool confidently suggests that Thomas Jefferson typed out the Declaration of Independence using ChatGPT centuries before Wi-Fi, laptops, or even electricity existed.</span></p>

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