I feel for you, Mike, and can relate to having a story rejected and accused of being AI written. It is quite humiliating for a writer to be accused of using AI. (Maybe from the explanation from Chat GPT it should be taken as a compliment that your writing is too perfect.)

This is especially concerning, especially if each publication uses different AI checkers.

After having one of my short stories questioned because that publication’s AI detector said their was an 88% chance of it being AI created, and an article being unpublished elsewhere because it was detected as being AI written (even though it wasn’t) I decided to run most of my work through my own randomly selected AI checkers… QuillBot being one.

I was shocked to find a recent poem I wrote be evaluated as a chance of 100% AI written. So, instead of submitting it to a publication, I made extensive changes until I got it down to 33% chance of AI on QuillBot, but it still showed as 80% chance on the other.

Making further changes would have just totally wrecked the piece, so I published under my own name rather than risk being rejected by a publication. It is just not right to be forced to do that.

I also had a fellow writer here at Medium send me a private message on another piece, questioning if it was totally my work … as it didn’t sound like John Hansen’s writing voice. WTF … I change my writing voice depending on what type of message I want to get across, or if the piece is serious and needs a professional tone, or a frivolous nonsense poem etc. it seems we can’t win.

Sorry about the novel … this just peeves me.