Ever since ChatGPT stormed the scene in late 2022, talk of its replacing writers has ebbed and flowed, with opinions differing on both the possibility of that actually happening and simply whether or not it’s even a bad thing. Well, it is happening, unfortunately, and moreover, according to a report from the tech site Gizmodo, writers were even accused of using AI for work when they weren’t.

Kimberly Gasuras rejected AI when it arrived, saying that she didn’t “need it,” because she’d been a writer for 24 years prior and didn’t see the point in using it now. However, her work was flagged for using AI despite her not even getting near it, and she promptly lost her job because of it.

Likewise, the article goes on to detail how a copywriter went through a similar ordeal. His workplace used AI software detection that concluded that his work was most likely being AI-generated.

So even though these writers wanted nothing to do with the chatbots, their work is still being flagged by detectors. And it’s literally costing them their jobs.

The detector that got Gasuras canned is called “Originality,” and although it is supposedly high accurate, the way it works isn’t quite clear. According to Gizmodo:

Originality has published numerous blog posts and studies about accuracy and other issues, including the dataset and methodology it used to develop and measure its own tools. However, Weber-Wulff at the University of Applied Sciences for Engineering and Economics in Berlin said the details about Originality’s methodology “were not that clear.”

AI Detectors Get It Wrong. Writers Are Being Fired Anyway (gizmodo.com)

In addition, a lot of the writers Gizmodo talked to think that AI detectors put their industry in a tough situation, because they make clients paranoid about AI use and, as we’ve seen, are not always accurate.