Do AI detectors work on essays written in Spanish, German or Arabic, not English?
I have a question about languages other than English, because I could not find a clear answer anywhere.
Cite
Global 100 Forum, "Do AI detectors work on essays written in Spanish, German or Arabic, not English?", https://forum.global100.org/q/do-ai-detectors-work-on-essays-written-in-spanish-german-or-arabic-not/, accessed 2026-10-13.Most of my courses are in English, but this term I also take an Arabic literature module where we write essays in Arabic, and a German language course where the final paper is in German. One friend told me the detectors are "English only", so there is nothing to worry about. Another friend said her Spanish department definitely gets AI scores on Turnitin, so they must work for other languages too.
So I did a small experiment. I took one paragraph I wrote myself in German and one paragraph I asked ChatGPT to write in German, and I put both into two free checkers. Both came back 0% for both paragraphs. Human and AI, the same result. This made me more confused, not less. Does 0% mean the text is safe, or does it mean the tool did not understand anything?
I worry in both directions. I do not want to be flagged for my own Arabic essay, and I also do not want a system where English essays are checked and German essays are not, because that is not fair either. Can someone explain what actually happens with non-English text?
1 more reply
Most helpful first- Priya N.Member ·
I tried something similar with Spanish last year for a bilingual section I was assisting. Three free tools, ten paragraphs each from students (with permission) and from a model. The results were noisy to the point of uselessness: one tool scored everything near zero like yours, one scored everything high including the student work, and one gave numbers that changed when I pasted the same paragraph twice. Length mattered too; anything under a few hundred words seemed to produce essentially random output.
Aisha, how long were your test paragraphs? If they were short, that alone could explain the flat zeros. But I would not read "0% on the AI paragraph" as the tool working. It looks more like the tool having no opinion and reporting that as a number.
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