Andrea Cristina McGlinchey

Minerva Suvanto, Andrea McGlinchey, Mattias Wahde et al.

We consider the problem of distinguishing human-written creative fiction (excerpts from novels) from similar text generated by an LLM. Our results show that, while human observers perform poorly (near chance levels) on this binary classification task, a variety of machine-learning models achieve accuracy in the range 0.93 - 0.98 over a previously unseen test set, even using only short samples and single-token (unigram) features. We therefore employ an inherently interpretable (linear) classifier (with a test accuracy of 0.98), in order to elucidate the underlying reasons for this high accuracy. In our analysis, we identify specific unigram features indicative of LLM-generated text, one of the most important being that the LLM tends to use a larger variety of synonyms, thereby skewing the probability distributions in a manner that is easy to detect for a machine learning classifier, yet very difficult for a human observer. Four additional explanation categories were also identified, namely, temporal drift, Americanisms, foreign language usage, and colloquialisms. As identification of the AI-generated text depends on a constellation of such features, the classification appears robust, and therefore not easy to circumvent by malicious actors intent on misrepresenting AI-generated text as human work.

Andrea Cristina McGlinchey, Peter J Barclay

Following the universal availability of generative AI systems with the release of ChatGPT, automatic detection of deceptive text created by Large Language Models has focused on domains such as academic plagiarism and "fake news". However, generative AI also poses a threat to the livelihood of creative writers, and perhaps to literary culture in general, through reduction in quality of published material. Training a Large Language Model on writers' output to generate "sham books" in a particular style seems to constitute a new form of plagiarism. This problem has been little researched. In this study, we trained Machine Learning classifier models to distinguish short samples of human-written from machine-generated creative fiction, focusing on classic detective novels. Our results show that a Naive Bayes and a Multi-Layer Perceptron classifier achieved a high degree of success (accuracy > 95%), significantly outperforming human judges (accuracy < 55%). This approach worked well with short text samples (around 100 words), which previous research has shown to be difficult to classify. We have deployed an online proof-of-concept classifier tool, AI Detective, as a first step towards developing lightweight and reliable applications for use by editors and publishers, with the aim of protecting the economic and cultural contribution of human authors.

Andrea McGlinchey, Peter J Barclay

Large language models can produce convincing "fake text" in domains such as academic writing, product reviews, and political news. Many approaches have been investigated for the detection of artificially generated text. While this may seem to presage an endless "arms race", we note that newer LLMs use ever more parameters, training data, and energy, while relatively simple classifiers demonstrate a good level of detection accuracy with modest resources. To approach the question of whether the models' ability to beat the detectors may therefore reach a plateau, we examine the ability of statistical classifiers to identify "fake text" in the style of classical detective fiction. Over a 0.5 version increase, we found that Gemini showed an increased ability to generate deceptive text, while GPT did not. This suggests that reliable detection of fake text may remain feasible even for ever-larger models, though new model architectures may improve their deceptiveness