AI Detectors Fail Diverse Student Populations: A Mathematical Framing of Structural Detection Limits
Student experiences and empirical studies report that "black box" AI text detectors produce high false positive rates with disproportionate errors against certain student populations, yet typically theoretical analyses model detection as a test between two known distributions for human and AI prose. This framing omits the structural feature of university assessment whereby an assessor generally does not know the individual student's writing distribution, making the null hypothesis composite. Standard application of the variational characterisation of total variation distance to this composite null shows trade-off bounds that any text-only, one-shot detector with useful power must produce ...
| Authors | Nathan Garland |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CY |
| Published | 11 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 March 2026 |
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