When Even the Best AI Detection Tools Fail, Return to Basics

Sarah Said, an ELA teacher in the greater Chicago area, was at the annual ISTE conference in Boston to speak about best practices in writing pedagogy. After her talk, a younger teacher approached her to say she couldn’t get students to write on paper, no matter how hard she tried. Said knew the teacher’s predicament well. “Since COVID, we've been so drawn to the Chromebook and iPad that we're not thinking about the paper and pencil, and the process that students use to think,” she says.

In some cases, students aren’t thinking at all–inside each of those digital devices, a new threat to teaching lies in wait: seamless access to AI bots that promise to ease the burden of thinking and writing altogether.

A year after the first LLMs launched, in late 2022, 13 percent of teenagers in the United States already reported using AI to write their papers. By 2025, that number had doubled, despite the concurrent rise of AI-detection tools like GPTzero and Turnitin, which promised to help educators identify writing produced by AI.

It didn’t take long for cracks to show: first-generation AI detectors were often unreliable, delivering false positives at alarming rates and putting teachers in the awkward position of rescinding false accusations. In some cases, accusations led to lawsuits against schools—sometimes because the claims were false, and sometimes because the schools had not yet explicitly forbidden AI use by students. Some schools responded by banning AI detection tools altogether.

In short, teachers wanted to verify that students are learning, but policing AI use was a mess.

Enter Pangram 

April 2025 seemed to promise a glorious new era in AI-detection, heralded by a tool called Pangram, developed by a hot new Brooklyn-based start-up called Pangram Labs.

While earlier AI detection tools functioned by identifying predictable, surface-level features like a proliferation of em-dashes, academic and corporate clichés, and a preference for latinate words–all of which students can easily adjust–Pangram devoured vast quantities of human writing and then compared that writing to AI versions of the same texts, learning to hear subtle distinctions in the way humans and LLMs express themselves. By creating “synthetic mirrors” of human language at scale, the software company hoped to keep people with a stake in the art of writing one giant step ahead of machines.

In July of this year, Pangram released its most sophisticated version yet, Pangram 4. Even more powerful than the previous iterations, it seemed like the failsafe solution teachers had been dreaming of for years. Boasting a microscopic margin of error—only 1 in 24,000, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland—Pangram 4, the company insisted, would finally help educators differentiate authentic human thinking from AI slop.

Wired called it the “gold standard” of AI detection, and in August, the tech journalist Brian X. Chen wrote in the New York Times that running text through Pangram 4 made him feel like George Nada, the protagonist in the 1988 sci-fi movie They Live, who finds a pair of sunglasses that enable him to identify aliens masquerading as humans on the streets of Los Angeles. It was so good, Chen confided, that it could spot specific sentences and phrases written by humans and then slipped into AI-generated text—as well as snippets of AI-generated text embedded within human writing.

Hallelujah, right?

Alas, no. A mere five weeks after Chen’s article appeared in the Times, an article from The Atlantic cited a new study, this time from Notre Dame: A new line of software called text “humanizers”—tools with names like Undetectable AI and WriteHuman AI–threatened to make Pangram obsolete. The researchers ran hundreds of AI-generated papers through the humanizers, then fed them back through AI-detection tools like Pangram—and found that by using “humanizing” tools, a student “can keep tweaking their AI-generated essay via trial and error until it comes back as ‘100-percent human,’” wrote Will Oremus.

Pangram 4, ascendant for less than two months, was already on its heels.

Apps or No Apps, Some Lessons Are Eternal

Teachers are back to the drawing board, and that may be a good thing, says Tim Requarth, a professor of neuroscience at New York University, where he teaches responsible use of AI in science writing. Requarth sees the possibility of students using a combination of Pangram 4 and new “humanizers” to evade its detection as a reason to “reassert the values and the cognitive skills” teachers want to instill in students, and to rethink how to best achieve that “regardless of whether this technology exists or not.”

The solution may not be another app, or even new ways of staying one step ahead of students, but rather a return to writing pedagogies that predate AI by decades.

This return to analog pedagogies began almost immediately after ChatGPT was released in November 2022. Blue Book sales tripled between December of that year and the end of 2025, as in-class writing assignments began to replace essays written outside of school. Oral exams came back into vogue, too, and teachers began asking students to write about in-class lectures or activities that were not documented anywhere online, theoretically forcing them to produce original work.

The focus in all these efforts has remained on the finished essay. But what if the final product were not as important as the journey to get there? That, some teachers say, is a question worth keeping top of mind today. After all, AI isn’t going away, and neither are programs that promise to thwart its detection.

Tanner Jones, chair of the English department at Basalt High School in western Colorado, recommends having students submit pieces of zero-stakes writing early in the semester that provide a window into their writing style, voice, and vocabulary. These written diagnostics can later be used to compare the students’ other written work. If a student submits a diagnostic that’s in passive voice or shows a poor grasp of subject-verb agreement, for example, but their later work is crisp and grammatically perfect, he talks with the student.

“When I suspect AI use, I will approach the student with curiosity rather than accusation,” he says, and starts with a few questions: "Take me through your process here ..."; "Can you explain why you decided to ..."; "Clarify what this word means in this context ..." Generally, a student will get to a place where they can't answer one of those questions, Jones says, and then he’ll ask if they used AI.

It’s best to never reach that point in the first place, but rather to make it so students don’t even want to use AI.

Skin in the Game: Jones believes the best way to discourage his teenage students from using AI is to get them personally invested in the assignment. Jones calls it “authentic writing,” and he’s honed it over the 20-plus years he’s been teaching.

His goal is to counter the formulaic academic writing standards foisted on students at ever-younger ages, ostensibly to prepare them for college and careers. Instead, Jones argues, these standards just make students feel “more detached from writing,” like they “don’t have any skin in the game.”

The age of AI has brought this into sharp relief. Say you ask a student to write an essay explaining the theme of To Kill a Mockingbird and to use three examples in each paragraph, “they're going to be like, ‘All right, AI,’” Jones says. Authentic writing solicits their perspective, no matter how unpolished. You might give them prompts like “How do you connect with Scout? What's an experience that you've had or seen that's similar?” Jones says, and “they tend to be like, ‘Oh, OK, this is kind of more about me.’”

Focus on the Journey: When writing becomes a chore, “it's really easy to outsource it to something else,” Jones says—and when grades are at stake, especially for students with a lot on their plates, outsourcing might seem like a rational choice. That’s why AI can be so enticing, not only for students who are prone to avoiding the work in general but also for high-achieving students who feel intense pressures of time, extracurriculars, and the need to get top grades for college applications. But if you can appeal to a student’s desire to express themselves—to be seen—it creates space for authentic writing.

Jones suggests focusing on the idea-generation and drafting process. At the middle or high school level, students might come up with some ideas or observations about a topic, then have a dialogue with their classmates and jot down the minutes of their conversation, which may include personal life experiences or knowledge acquired from other classes and outside interests. From there, they can start to organize their ideas on paper.

This might lead to a piece of formal writing submitted for a grade, or it might not. What matters are the steps along the way, from ideation to working through an argument, and then building one thought on top of another to form a cogent essay. Writing is thinking, after all, and thinking takes time. The value consists in the work, not the outcome.

Brainstorms, Rough Drafts, and Peer Reviews: Because writing can be a lonely or even painful endeavor, the frictionless assist of AI offers a tempting out. But when generating ideas and rough drafts serve as doorways to connect with other students and even forge friendships, writing becomes a social event. Indeed, the writing process itself is almost incidental to the joy students can derive from working together on a project.

Jen Roberts, who has taught high school English for more than 25 years, recommends having students work in pairs. Not only does this give them built-in accountability, but also models the way people often work together in professional environments. “When two students are working together on a piece of writing, they must discuss the content and make decisions together,” Roberts wrote in a 2025 article on authentic writing. “This makes the writing process more cognitively complex for both of them.”

Roberts has also found that incorporating peer review early in the writing process reduces the temptation to use AI because the stigma attached to using AI can exact a social cost: Students know it’s not cool and are often embarrassed to be caught using AI by their classmates. “I have yet to see a student try to pass off AI writing as their own to their peers,” she writes. “When I am reviewing a student paper and I see lots of helpful comments from their classmates, I consider that another sign of the authenticity of the writing.”

Sensory Overload: Donna Paul, an elementary Montessori teacher based in British Columbia, likes to engage students’ senses to facilitate authentic writing. She’ll take the kids on a walk, for example, and encourage them to feel the crunch of leaves underfoot, listen to birds singing, and literally smell the flowers. Then, back in the classroom, she’ll give them prompts to write about their experience, drawing on what their senses told them.

Like Paul, Tanner Jones uses the natural world in his writing classes, and asks students to think of 20 adjectives or phrases to describe a given object they find outside. Take a freshly fallen oak leaf, for instance. A student might go from writing a flat observation like “the leaf is yellow,” Jones says, to something surprising and lyrical: “the leaf is a heart with veins receding in size from the central stem.”

Such experiential writing could be applied to more academic assignments, like explaining how a moment in history applies to society today, or what Romeo and Juliet suggests about young love. For example, a teacher might make a lesson more personal by playing Renaissance-era music and serving mulled cider in the classroom, before asking students to add a new scene involving food to the bard’s tale of star-crossed romance.

Nothing Beats Paper: Said, who teaches 10th grade English, says she always has students write on paper first, and then works with them to develop their essays over time. “Sometimes we forget about a multi-draft process, and I think that that's important,” she says. She acknowledges that this can be easier said than done, especially given how strapped for time both teachers and students can be. “But we have to make that time.”

She now requires students to get permission from her before typing their essays, and she grants it only after the piece has been thoroughly developed on paper first. Research supports Said’s approach. A 2024 study found that writing by hand activates brain areas involved with visual, motor, and linguistic functions, suggesting, as Youki Terada wrote last spring, “that handwriting plays a deeper, more foundational role in learning than was previously known.”

For Said, the paper-drafting process helps to ensure neurological development while still allowing for later use of digital devices as tools, rather than crutches. “It's not like we're going to say no technology,” she says. “It's more about, OK, there's a time and a place to use the technology.”

Embodied Thinking: While the essay has long been considered the best way to teach students to think critically and express themselves with care, it didn’t always hold the place in schools it does today. In late September, the New York Times ran an op-ed noting that the idea of writing as an unassailable part of intellectual development emerged only in the 1970s, with the advent of Writing Across the Curriculum programs at colleges and universities nationwide.

The author, Joe Cruz, who chairs the philosophy and cognitive science department at Williams College, argued that because AI threatens to make human writing obsolete, he has begun leaning more into class discussion and extemporaneous debate to engage his students through “messy, searching conversation, responding to their presence in the classroom to gauge whether we’re understanding one another.”

Cruz makes a compelling case, but there’s an inherent irony in his argument: he makes it in writing, and it’s compelling precisely because it’s so well-written.

Nevertheless, there may be value in thinking outside the box of the five-paragraph essay–not to replace it wholesale, but to imagine additional methods of teaching the skills that writing has historically bestowed. “There are many, many ways to instill values and cognitive skills in students,” Tim Requarth says. These could include in-class debate, analyzing song lyrics, and even acting out scenes from assigned books to demonstrate comprehension of central themes and ideas.

Sarah Said’s dedication to writing, meanwhile, remains steadfast. “Students don’t have the stamina they used to,” she says. “Teaching the essay is going to bring back that stamina.”