If you're answering

Accused of using AI on your work

A professor, a teaching assistant or a manager says your work was written by AI. You know it wasn't. Here is what the accusation usually rests on, and what actually answers it.

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Last updated Oct 10, 2026

Why this is so hard to answer

Most accusations like this come from one of two places: a detector score, or somebody's impression that your writing "sounds like AI."

Neither of those is something you can argue with directly. You cannot disprove a feeling, and arguing about a percentage puts you in a fight about software you did not write and cannot inspect.

What you can do is show your process. Not the finished work — anybody can hand in a finished document. The record of it being made.

What detectors actually are

Worth knowing, because it changes how you respond.

These tools estimate how predictable a piece of writing is. Clear, plain, well-organized prose scores as more predictable than messy prose. So does writing by somebody who learned English as a second language, and so does writing in a formal register, and so does anything short.

They produce a likelihood, not a finding. The companies that make them say so in their own documentation. That is a reasonable thing to ask about — not as an accusation of your own, just as a question: what is this number, and what does the institution's own policy say about relying on it?

What answers it: your process

This is the whole page, and it works better the earlier you start.

Version history. If you wrote the document in Google Docs or Word with autosave on, there is a complete record of it being built — hours of small edits, sentences rewritten, paragraphs moved. That is very difficult to fake and it is the single strongest thing you can produce. Go and check whether you have it before you do anything else.

Your drafts. Earlier files, even bad ones. The outline. The version with the paragraph you cut.

Your notes and sources. Highlighted readings, library checkouts, photographs of book pages, browser history from the days you were working.

Where you were. Your own calendar, a message to a friend at 1 a.m. saying you were still working on it, a library login.

The thinking. If you handwrote notes, photograph them now with the date.

Start today

One thing, today.

Write down your own account of how you made this piece of work. When you started, how long it took, which days, where you worked, what you read, what you struggled with, what order you wrote the sections in, what you changed and why.

Do it now, before any meeting. Specific process detail is the thing somebody who did not do the work cannot produce, and it is also the thing you will forget first.

What to ask for, in writing

Short email, calm, before any meeting:

• What specifically is the concern, and which part of the work does it apply to?
• What is it based on?
• What is the process from here, and what are my options at each step?
• May I bring somebody with me?

Keep a copy of the asking. You may not get full answers, and the fact that you asked is worth having either way.

What to leave alone

• Don't delete anything. Not the drafts, not the browser history, not the chat where you asked a friend to read it. Deleting is the worst thing you can do here, and it is usually what people reach for first.
• Don't rewrite the work to sound less polished. It changes the file and it changes the history.
• Don't run your own work through a detector and send them the result. You are then arguing on their ground with their tool, and a second score does not help you.
• Don't admit to something you did not do to make it go away. A record of admitting it follows you further than the accusation would have.
• Don't be sarcastic in writing. Everything you send is going in the file.

If you did use it for some of it

Be straight about that, with yourself at least.

There is usually a large gap between the policy as written and what people assume it says — spellcheck, grammar tools, a translation, asking it to explain a concept, and writing the thing for you are very different acts and the policy may treat them very differently. Find out what your institution's or employer's policy actually says, in its own words, and describe what you did accurately against it.

Describing what you did and where the line sits lands far better than a denial that turns out to be partly wrong.

What your side looks like when it is in order

BuildMyEvidence is a place to put it. You write down what happened and attach what you already have. Everything gets a date and a number.

For an accusation like this, that gives you:

• A dated account of how you made the work, written in your words.
• One chronology of the days you worked on it and what you did on each.
• Your documents, listed and numbered — drafts, version history exports, notes, sources, screenshots.
• Their points, listed separately, with what bears on each one underneath.
• Your own statement, numbered as paragraphs, with a page at the end to sign by hand.

You can read every page in full before you pay. The screen copy carries preview marks across it. The file you download is clean, and it is $59 once, for this case. What the $59 covers

It is a record, not an advocate. It does not tell you whether you will be believed. It makes sure that the version of events you give is the one you wrote down while you still remembered it.

Read one that is already written

Two of our four worked examples are written from this side — somebody answering something they did not start. You can open them and read every page, free.

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Questions people ask

They won't tell me what the evidence is.

Ask in writing, and keep the copy. In the meantime, build your process record anyway — it does not depend on knowing what they have.

I wrote it on my phone / on paper, so there's no version history.

Then say so plainly rather than inventing something, and lean harder on everything else: the photographs of your notes, your sources, your calendar, your own account of the days.

Can I appeal?

Almost always there is some route, and the details differ by institution. The notice you were given, and your student handbook or employee handbook, are where that is set out.

Is what I write here private?

Yes. It is your account, in your account, and nothing leaves it unless you send it. Privacy

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