标签：#forensics

Originally published at htpbe.tech . The version on htpbe.tech stays in sync with the latest detection algorithm — refer to it for the canonical text. Accounts payable teams are receiving receipts generated by ChatGPT plugins. HR platforms are seeing payslips rendered by Python scripts. Insurance claims contain repair estimates that no shop ever issued. The documents look correct. The logos match. The numbers are plausible. The question is: what can actually be detected, and what cannot? The honest answer requires separating two things that are often confused under the phrase “AI-generated document detection.” Two distinct problems called "AI-generated document detection" When people ask how to detect an AI-generated document, they usually mean one of two distinct things: Content classification asks: was the text in this document written by an AI language model? This is what tools like GPTZero and Turnitin’s AI detector do. They analyze writing style, token probability distributions, and linguistic patterns to estimate whether a human or a model produced the text. Structural forensics asks: was this PDF file generated by a real institutional system, or did it come from a headless browser, a PDF library, or a consumer tool? This is what HTPBE does. It reads the binary structure of the file — producer metadata, xref patterns, font embedding, object numbering — and checks whether those patterns match how legitimate institutional software generates documents. These are not the same problem. A document can contain AI-written text and still come from a real corporate system. A document can contain entirely human-written text and still have been rendered by Puppeteer an hour ago. The structural check and the content check answer different questions. HTPBE does structural forensics. It does not classify text. This article explains what that distinction means in practice, what the structural approach reliably catches, and where its limits are. What structural forensics detec