Dubious AI detectors drive ‘pay-to-humanise’ scam

Feed an Iranian news dispatch or a literary classic into some text detectors, and they return the same verdict: AI-generated. Then comes the pitch: pay to “humanise” the writing, a pattern experts say bears the hallmarks of a scam.

As AI falsehoods explode across social media, often outpacing the capacity of professional fact-checkers, bogus detectors risk adding another layer of deception to an already fractured information ecosystem.

While even reliable AI detectors can produce false results, researchers say a crop of fraudulent tools has emerged online, easily weaponised to discredit authentic content and tarnish reputations.

AFP’s fact-checkers identified three such text detectors that claim to estimate what percentage is AI-generated. The tools — prompted in four languages — not only misidentified authentic text as AI-generated but also attempted to monetise those errors.

One detector, JustDone AI, processed a human-written report about the US-Iran war and wrongly concluded it contained “88 per cent AI content”. It then offered to scrub any trace of AI for a fee.

“Your AI text is humanising,” the site claimed, leading to a page where “100pc unique text” was locked behind a paywall charging up to $9.99.

Two other tools — TextGuard and Refinely — produced similar false positives and sought to monetize them.