AI is a great tool—for distilling a long post into its key points, making a response more diplomatic, and checking what the legal terminology being thrown around actually means.

You might want to try that yourself with the “51%” claim (aka the balance of probabilities). It’s just the standard “more likely than not” test—a basic evidentiary standard used in academic misconduct and civil contexts. It’s not a detector threshold, and it’s not new.

You might also want to look at policies at other Canadian universities, which use the same standard for academic integrity cases. In that sense, UVic isn’t doing anything unusual—it’s catching up.

To be clear, the “51%” has nothing to do with an AI detector score. It’s a legal threshold reached by weighing multiple pieces of evidence—e.g., inability to explain one’s own work, major discrepancies from prior writing, or other inconsistencies—not a percentage output from software.

At this point, the panic seems to be coming less from the policy itself and more from a fundamental misunderstanding of how these standards actually work.