Over the past ~2 weeks or so, I have begun working on my UC PIQ’s. During this time I thought I had wrote some pretty good essays, up to today, I have about 3/4 of the essays completed. I decided to run them through plagiarism and AI detectors just out of curiosity and I found that they all pass the plagiarism detectors with no signs of plagiarism (I would hope not lol). But after running them all through a couple of ai detectors such as GPTZero or Scribbr’s ai detection tool they all came back as about 70% all the way up to 87% ai detected. This freaked me out quite a bit since these were written completely by me (I do have Grammarly but that was only used to fix a couple of errors such as forgetting a comma somewhere or a grammatical error). This led me to into a spiral of just researching for hours if people have also run into this problem and most of what I found online just said to not worry as ai detection tools arent reliable. But none of this really helped me, Im scared if I submit these essays that the UC’s are going to email me and say something about it especially since I’ve read online that they use Turnitin. Am I screwed?? What can I do?? I know I have my edit history so maybe I can use that to prove it???
I will say from experience (as an instructor) that AI detectors have become basically worthless. Usually, for me, it’s the opposite of your experience – I run across a piece that I’m absolutely certain is AI-generated, and it comes up as mostly human written when I run it through detectors (I’m still convinced I’m right, but I end up deducting points because it simply doesn’t fulfill the assignment rather than giving zeroes for violating academic integrity). Anyhow – what I’m saying is that I doubt AOs are using AI detectors as a hard-and-fast standard, either, because everyone is well aware of the flaws.
So what do you do to make sure your essays don’t spark suspicion? Make sure your voice is coming through loud and clear in the essay (don’t overwrite, but find ways to express yourself using language and turns of phrase that are distinctive to you and reflect your personality). Use concrete details and examples. Doing all of this will make the essay seem more original and less formulaic. Perhaps have an English teacher (or another teacher who grades a lot of writing) take a look and see if your essay would make them suspicious, and if so, ask what red flags they detect.
That’s about all you can do. This is such murky territory, and AOs know that. You just want as much of your voice coming through as possible. If there’s anything that AI-generated papers lack, it’s authenticity.
AI detectors are terrible and if colleges are using them, they shouldn’t.
I know this wasn’t AI.
I have corrected sentences like this. Normally, it’s written: “During this time, I thought I had written some pretty good essays. . .”
We help students on here with college essays. I have heard this from more then one student. Talk to your teachers /school about this. All you can do is write the best essay you can.
oops, a silly mistake by me! 
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