Amplifying, Not Learning: The Price of Out-of-Distribution Generalization in AI-Text Detection

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arXiv:2605.21653v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI-text detectors gate decisions in education, hiring, and publishing, yet they flag the most fluent, formal human writing as machine-generated: they rate the median formal-native human essay as 99.5% likely AI while clearing genuine high-temperature AI at 10.5%. Deployed detectors share it (chatgpt-detector-roberta flags 56% of formal essays at a 1% false-alarm rate). This is not a calibration bug but the signature of one mechanism: a fine-tuned detector does not learn an AI-versus-human boundary, it amplifies an inherited typicality axis (predictability under a language model) that pre-exists fine-tuning, rescaling it rather than constructing one. Decomposing the detector into this inherited reading and a fine-tuned residual, the inherited part carries the bulk of cross-generator transfer and produces the over-flagging of formal humans, while the residual is generator-specific and does not transfer; a frozen-representation probe fit on ~25 labels per class matches the fully fine-tuned detector on unseen generators (cross-generator AUROC 0.893 vs 0.831). This yields a no-go: because the axis that transfers is the axis that over-flags, no training objective, threshold, concept-erasure, or ensemble we test removes the harm while preserving cross-generator detection, across three architectures, fine-tuned decoders, and zero-shot perplexity detectors. A closed-form, training-free operator relocates and diagnoses the bias (reviving a dead deployed detector, true-positive rate 0 to 0.904 at a 1% false-alarm rate) but, …

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