I was falsely accused of using ChatGPT for my work

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I’ve recently taken on a new role that’s a professional downshift so that I can ultimately pivot toward more fulfilling work. It’s fun, varied work that I love, but it does mean that I am earning significantly less, and I have been taking on freelance copywriting jobs to help make up the difference. I have a strong reputation in my field and my clients have been universally pleased with my work.

However, despite personally writing every word of my most recent assignment, the final work was run through an AI detector and was determined to have been generated by ChatGPT. This stung — it was an accusation of dishonesty, discounted my years of skill, and feels like the first of what may become many such instances in the future.

I know that AI scanners are unreliable and have been widely discredited — hell, even OpenAI has pulled the plug on their own detector, citing a low rate of accuracy — but I still wonder how I can protect myself against this kind of thing happening with future projects. I worry that I’ll put in hours and hours of work, only for clients to lose trust in the integrity of my work and/or skip out on invoices, having been convinced by a faulty program that they’re getting ripped off.

Any suggestions for reassuring clients and proving my work is, in fact, human-generated?

That’s infuriating.

Anyone who’s using an AI detector needs to be aware that they’re notoriously inaccurate. You can run pieces of writing through them that were created decades ago, long before AI existed, and get told AI wrote them. One “detector” even claimed the U.S. Constitution was written by AI. And as you point out, OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, shut down its own AI detector because of low accuracy. They’re ridiculously problematic.

So, you could start by asking your client which AI detector they used and explaining their well-documented inaccuracies. (Here are some links you could use: 1, 2, 3) You could say firmly that as a professional writer whose reputation is your livelihood, you take allegations of using AI very seriously and you hope they’ll give you the opportunity to show how baseless the assertion is.

Then offer to show them your version history. Google Docs, Microsoft Word, and many other writing programs keep a version history that tracks every change you made and when you made it, which will make it clear that you wrote through a normal, messy, human process with revisions and that whole chunks of fully formed text weren’t simply pasted in.

If they don’t backtrack once you calmly educate them, is this even a client you want?