Imagine that you’re helping judge a writing contest at your school. You want to make sure everyone did their own work. If someone used an artificial intelligence, or AI, model such as ChatGPT to write an entry, that shouldn’t count. But how can you tell whether something was written by AI? New research reveals a simple way to test whether a person wrote something or not. Just ask a bot to rewrite it.
“If you ask AI to rewrite content written by AI, it will have very few edits,” says Chengzhi Mao. When AI rewrites a person’s text, it typically makes many more changes.
Mao, Junfeng Yang and their colleagues designed a tool called Raidar. It’s a detector that uses AI rewriting to detect bot-generated text. Mao is a researcher at the Software Systems Lab at Columbia University in New York. Yang leads this lab.
Separating bot-talk from person-talk is “very important,” says Yang. Lots of AI writing has already flooded social media and product reviews. It has fueled fake news websites and spam books. Some students use AI to cheat on homework and tests. Tools like Raidar could help expose AI-powered cheaters and liars.
Raidar’s creators shared the tool at the International Conference on Learning Representations. That meeting was on May 7 in Vienna, Austria.
Weeding out AI
Mao regularly uses ChatGPT to help polish his own writing. For example, he sometimes asks the bot to rewrite and improve an email. He noticed that this bot can do a pretty good job the first time it rewrites something that he wrote. But if he asks it to improve an email again — revising its own bot writing — then it won’t change much.
“That’s how we got motivated,” Mao says. He realized the number of…
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