AI text detectors miss up to half of style-imitated scientific writing

Epoch AI tested three widely used AI text detectors (Pangram, GPTZero, Originality.ai) against text where a model was prompted to mimic a specific author's style. Detection failed on up to 18% of general passages and as much as 48% of scientific writing.

Why it matters: Scientific publishing is exactly the domain where these detectors are most relied upon for integrity checks, so a near-coin-flip miss rate there undermines their practical value just as academic institutions lean on them for policy enforcement. It underscores that AI-text detection remains an adversarial, unsolved problem rather than a settled tool.