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The thing is, the people producing the novel can use the detectors too, and iterate until the signal goes away. I have a friend who is taking some college courses that require essays, and they're explicitly told that Grammarly must not flag the essay as AI-written. Unfortunately (and somewhat amusingly), the detector sucks, and her normal writing is flagged as AI-written all the time - she has to rewrite it in a more awkward manner to get the metric below the threshold. Similarly, I imagine any given GPT detector could be defeated by just hooking it up to the GPT in a negative-feedback loop.
Grammarly is an absolutely terrible grift company. They should be discredited and it's unfortunate that their shitty sales tactics actually got schools to fall for their bullshit. Their original purpose, fixing grammar, is also absolute shite and doesn't even flag many basic errors.
Their detector must be just plain awful then. Another motter shared this paper to show how inaccurate gpt detectors are, and most of the detectors had zero false accusations in the tested data. https://www.themotte.org/post/1860/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/324173?context=8#context
But for actual gpt detectors it's quite hard to iterate to remove it. I tried once to take a very stinky chatgpt passage and massage it to pass gptzero, but even after serious changes it was still flagged. You'd basically have to rewrite most of it by hand, which is kind of the point. By the time you've rewritten chatgpt's output enough to pass the check, you have done just as much work as writing it yourself.
Sounds like you have some practical experience here. Yeah, if just iterating doesn't help and a human has to step in to "fix" the output, then at least there'll be some effort required to bring an AI novel to market. But it does feel like detectors (even the good non-Grammarly ones) are the underdogs fighting a doomed battle.
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