A bizarre and intriguing claim is currently going viral: that the American Declaration of Independence, a foundational document of modern democracy, was written by artificial intelligence.
The theory stems from users running the text of the 1776 document through various AI detection tools. To everyone's surprise, multiple sites reportedly flagged the historic text as being AI-generated. This has, inevitably, sparked a wave of wild speculation.
But before we entertain ideas of time-travelling Founding Fathers, let's examine the facts and find the real, far more mundane explanation.
The Historical Significance of the Document
First, it's crucial to understand what we're dealing with. The Declaration of Independence, primarily penned by Thomas Jefferson with input from John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, is one of the most influential political texts ever written.
It wasn't merely a notice of separation from Britain; its assertion that "all men are created equal" and have the right to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" laid the philosophical groundwork for the modern world. Its language is powerful, precise, and deliberately crafted—a masterpiece of Enlightenment thinking.
The Viral Claim and The Wild Theories It Spawned
The internet being the internet, the AI detector results were immediately taken as "proof" of something extraordinary. The main conspiracy theories that emerged are:
The Time Travel Theory: Perhaps a time traveller from our future went back to 1776 with advanced AI technology to help draft the perfect document, ensuring the United States was founded on "ideal" principles.
The Secret Technology Theory: Maybe the Founding Fathers, many of whom were Freemasons and men of science like Benjamin Franklin, had access to lost or alien technology that allowed them to generate flawless text.
The Scientific Reality: Is Time Travel Even Possible?
Let's address the most popular sci-fi theory. While time travel is a fascinating academic concept in theoretical physics, the consensus is clear: it is not possible in the way these theories suggest.
Even in theory, most models (like those involving closed timelike curves) suggest you could only travel back to the point after the time machine was invented. You couldn't pop back to 1776 from a 2024 that hasn't invented a working machine. The idea of intervening in the past to write a document is pure fiction with no basis in current science.
The Real Explanation: How AI Detectors Actually Work
The truth is far less exciting and reveals a critical flaw in relying on these tools. The viral claim gets the relationship completely backwards.
AI doesn't plagiarise the Declaration; the Declaration is now part of AI's training data.
Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are trained on a colossal amount of text data scraped from the internet—encyclopaedias, books, news articles, and yes, foundational historical documents like the Declaration of Independence, Shakespeare's plays, and Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
AI detectors work by analysing text for certain characteristics, such as:
Perplexity: How "surprised" the model is by the word choices. Common, predictable text has low perplexity.
Burstiness: The variation in sentence length and structure.
The Declaration of Independence, having been meticulously edited and polished to perfection, exhibits very low perplexity and burstiness. Its language is formal, structured, and highly predictable to an AI model that has learned from it. It reads like what the AI expects a "perfect" formal document to be, hence the false positive.
The Limitations of AI Detection Tools
The fact that 6-7 sites flagged the text isn't proof of a conspiracy; it's proof that most detectors use similar, flawed algorithms. These tools are:
Unreliable: They are known to frequently misclassify human-written text, especially from non-native speakers or, as in this case, formal, historical prose.
Designed for a modern context: They are built to catch students or content farmers cheating with ChatGPT, not to analyse 250-year-old political manuscripts crafted by brilliant philosophers.
Conclusion: A Lesson in Critical Thinking
This viral story is a perfect case study in why we mustn't take every online claim at face value. Technology is incredible, but it is not infallible.
The Declaration of Independence wasn't written by AI; rather, our modern AI has been taught by the Declaration of Independence. The result is a humorous and ironic glitch that tells us much more about the limitations of our new tools than it does about the secrets of history.
The real story—of Enlightenment thinkers crafting a world-changing document under immense pressure—remains more impressive than any far-fetched conspiracy theory.
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