When AI Rewrites, Classifiers Relax: Uncertainty-Aware Sentiment Analysis on Sarcastic and AI-Paraphrased Social Text

Sentiment classifiers are increasingly applied to social media content that is either sarcastic or AI-generated --- two distributional regimes where standard evaluations offer little guidance. We present a three-part empirical study of sentiment classifier behaviour under these conditions. First, we find that confidence scores on sarcastic text are significantly lower than on non-sarcastic text (Mann--Whitney p = 2 × 10-6), confirming that classifiers sense their own uncertainty on ironic content even without explicit uncertainty modelling. Second, and counterintuitively, we show that sentiment classifiers achieve higher accuracy on AI-paraphrased reviews than on the original human-authored text (RoBERTa: +5.8 pp for Qwen3.5-4B paraphrases, +3.7 pp for Gemma4-E4B), revealing a cross-domain stylistic alignment effect: AI paraphrases remove distributional noise that confounds Twitter-trained classifiers, producing cleaner, more prototypical sentiment text. Third, we demonstrate that a lightweight abstention wrapper --- flagging the 14% of inputs with confidence below 0.6 --- improves accuracy from 82.2% to 88.9% (+6.7 pp) on the retained set. We further compare Semantic Entropy and MC-Dropout-style disagreement as uncertainty signals and find near-identical AUROC (0.650 vs. 0.646) on sarcastic text, suggesting that for short social media inputs, both methods are interchangeable. Our results motivate a shift from confident single-label prediction to uncertainty-aware abstention in high-stakes sentiment applications such as mental health flagging and content moderation.