A Practical Examination of AI-Generated Text Detectors for Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tufts, Brian, Zhao, Xuandong, Li, Lei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Tufts, Brian
Zhao, Xuandong
Li, Lei
author_facet Tufts, Brian
Zhao, Xuandong
Li, Lei
contents The proliferation of large language models has raised growing concerns about their misuse, particularly in cases where AI-generated text is falsely attributed to human authors. Machine-generated content detectors claim to effectively identify such text under various conditions and from any language model. This paper critically evaluates these claims by assessing several popular detectors (RADAR, Wild, T5Sentinel, Fast-DetectGPT, PHD, LogRank, Binoculars) on a range of domains, datasets, and models that these detectors have not previously encountered. We employ various prompting strategies to simulate practical adversarial attacks, demonstrating that even moderate efforts can significantly evade detection. We emphasize the importance of the true positive rate at a specific false positive rate (TPR@FPR) metric and demonstrate that these detectors perform poorly in certain settings, with TPR@.01 as low as 0%. Our findings suggest that both trained and zero-shot detectors struggle to maintain high sensitivity while achieving a reasonable true positive rate.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_05139
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Practical Examination of AI-Generated Text Detectors for Large Language Models
Tufts, Brian
Zhao, Xuandong
Li, Lei
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The proliferation of large language models has raised growing concerns about their misuse, particularly in cases where AI-generated text is falsely attributed to human authors. Machine-generated content detectors claim to effectively identify such text under various conditions and from any language model. This paper critically evaluates these claims by assessing several popular detectors (RADAR, Wild, T5Sentinel, Fast-DetectGPT, PHD, LogRank, Binoculars) on a range of domains, datasets, and models that these detectors have not previously encountered. We employ various prompting strategies to simulate practical adversarial attacks, demonstrating that even moderate efforts can significantly evade detection. We emphasize the importance of the true positive rate at a specific false positive rate (TPR@FPR) metric and demonstrate that these detectors perform poorly in certain settings, with TPR@.01 as low as 0%. Our findings suggest that both trained and zero-shot detectors struggle to maintain high sensitivity while achieving a reasonable true positive rate.
title A Practical Examination of AI-Generated Text Detectors for Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.05139