Policy-Conditioned AI-Use Detection: An Evidentiary Framework for Academic Publishing

Summary

Major venues now publish detailed rules about how authors, reviewers, and area chairs may use AI, and those rules differ by role, by task, and by what must be disclosed. AI detection, the instrument usually proposed to enforce them, estimates something else: whether an AI model wrote the text. We argue that this target is misaligned with the decisions conferences and journals face, and propose policy-conditioned AI-use detection, an evidentiary framework for assessing whether a human--AI workflow complied with a stated rule. Policy makes the governing rule an explicit input. Inference reports hypotheses, evidence, calibration regime, and uncertainty in place of verdicts such as "AI detected". Evaluation builds benchmarks from reproducible pipelines that generate compliant and non-compliant workflows, and reports true positive rate at a false positive rate the venue fixes in advance. We work the framework through peer review, where at plausible violation rates a detector at a strong operating point still flags more compliant authors than violating ones. The framework therefore also names what a venue must instrument: structured disclosure, approved-tool routing that respects reviewer confidentiality, and a path by which a finding can be contested. Under this framing a detector is not an authorship classifier but an auditable procedure with an error rate the venue fixes in advance and can defend.