Yes, AI detectors can make mistakes. They can identify human-written content as AI-generated, or they can miss AI-generated text altogether.
- False positives often occur with academic writing, technical documents, or content written by non-native English speakers. This is because their writing style may appear robotic to the AI detector.
- False negatives occur when AI-generated text has been heavily edited. In these cases, the detector may not be able to identify it as AI-generated.
No AI detector is perfect, so its results should be used as a guide rather than as definitive proof.
For a deeper look at the signals detectors rely on, see our post on How to Tell If Something Was Written by AI. Quetext's AI Detector gives you sentence-level context so you can evaluate results with confidence.