The Em Dash Didn’t Do Anything Wrong
Somewhere along the way, a punctuation mark older than the typewriter became “proof” of ChatGPT. It’s time to call off the witch hunt.
The archive · 11 stories
All stories
October 2026
DetectorsExplainer
Perplexity, Burstiness, and the Myth of the Machine Fingerprint
Every AI detector claims to see something in your writing. Here is what they are actually measuring — and why it was never a fingerprint to begin with.
September 2026
ClassroomGuide
Falsely Accused of Using AI? Here’s What to Do in the First 48 Hours
A calm, practical guide for students who wrote their own work and got flagged anyway — from gathering evidence to asking the right questions.
DetectorsAnalysis
Your Essay Isn’t a Robot. Neither Is the Constitution.
False positives aren’t a rounding error in AI detection. They are the predictable result of how detectors work — and the people they land on are not random.
HumanizersInvestigation
Inside the Humanizer Economy
Word limits, “undetectable” guarantees and comparison pages written by the vendors themselves. A tour of the business built on beating the detectors.
Should Universities Just Turn the Detectors Off?
Some already have. The case for retiring AI detection in classrooms isn’t that cheating doesn’t matter — it’s that the tools make the wrong mistakes.
HumanizersExplainer
Paraphrase, Rinse, Repeat: What a Humanizer Actually Does to Your Sentences
Synonym swaps, sentence surgery, planted typos and invisible characters. A teardown of the techniques humanizers use, and what they cost the writing.
DetectorsAnalysis
Watermarks Were Supposed to Settle This
Hide a statistical signature in every sentence a model writes, and detection becomes math instead of guesswork. So why hasn’t it ended the argument?
ClassroomAnalysis
The Syllabus Clause Wars
Total bans, open doors and traffic lights: how course AI policies are being written in real time, and why students keep getting caught between them.
LabMethodology
How We Test Detectors and Humanizers
Corpora, thresholds, blind readers and the numbers we refuse to publish without context. The DetectionGuide testing protocol, in full.
DetectorsHistory
OpenAI Built a Detector, Then Quietly Turned It Off
In 2023, the company behind ChatGPT released its own AI text classifier. Six months later it was gone, citing a “low rate of accuracy.” The lesson still hasn’t sunk in.