Kailash Patil

Kevin Stowe, Kailash Patil

With the rise of generative language models, machine-generated text detection has become a critical challenge. A wide variety of models is available, but inconsistent datasets, evaluation metrics, and assessment strategies obscure comparisons of model effectiveness. To address this, we evaluate 15 different detection models from six distinct systems, as well as seven trained models, across seven English-language textual test sets and three creative human-written datasets. We provide an empirical analysis of model performance, the influence of training and evaluation data, and the impact of key metrics. We find that no single system excels in all areas and nearly all are effective for certain tasks, and the representation of model performance is critically linked to dataset and metric choices. We find high variance in model ranks based on datasets and metrics, and overall poor performance on novel human-written texts in high-risk domains. Across datasets and metrics, we find that methodological choices that are often assumed or overlooked are essential for clearly and accurately reflecting model performance.

Kevin Stowe, Svetlana Afanaseva, Rodolfo Raimundo et al.

The meteoric rise in text generation capability has been accompanied by parallel growth in interest in machine-generated text detection: the capability to identify whether a given text was generated using a model or written by a person. While detection models show strong performance, they have the capacity to cause significant negative impacts. We explore potential biases in English machine-generated text detection systems. We curate a dataset of student essays and assess 16 different detection systems for bias across four attributes: gender, race/ethnicity, English-language learner (ELL) status, and economic status. We evaluate these attributes using regression-based models to determine the significance and power of the effects, as well as performing subgroup analysis. We find that while biases are generally inconsistent across systems, there are several key issues: several models tend to classify disadvantaged groups as machine-generated, ELL essays are more likely to be classified as machine-generated, economically disadvantaged students' essays are less likely to be classified as machine-generated, and non-White ELL essays are disproportionately classified as machine-generated relative to their White counterparts. Finally, we perform human annotation and find that while humans perform generally poorly at the detection task, they show no significant biases on the studied attributes.