In the wake of the high-profile launch of ChatGPT, no fewer than seven developers or companies have countered with AI detectors. That is, AI they say is able to tell when content was written by another AI. These new algorithms are pitched to educators, journalists, and others as tools to flag cheating, plagiarism, and mis- or disinformation.
In the wake of the high-profile launch of ChatGPT, no fewer than seven developers or companies have countered with AI detectors. That is, AI they say is able to tell when content was written by another AI. These new algorithms are pitched to educators, journalists, and others as tools to flag cheating, plagiarism, and mis- or disinformation.
It’s all very meta, but according to a new paper from Stanford scholars, there’s just one (very big) problem: The detectors are not particularly reliable. Worse yet, they are especially unreliable when the real author (a human) is not a native English speaker.
The numbers are grim. While the detectors were “near-perfect” in evaluating essays written by U.S.-born eighth-graders, they classified more than half of TOEFL essays (61.22%) written by non-native English students as AI-generated (TOEFL is an acronym for the Test of English as a Foreign Language).
It gets worse. According to the study, all seven AI detectors unanimously identified 18 of the 91 TOEFL student essays (19%) as AI-generated and a remarkable 89 of the 91 TOEFL essays (97%) were flagged by at least one of the detectors.
