How Large Language Models are Transforming Machine-Paraphrased Plagiarism
This addresses academic integrity threats from AI-generated paraphrases, representing incremental research on detection methods.
The study tackled the problem of machine-paraphrased plagiarism using large language models like T5 and GPT-3, finding that humans struggle to detect such paraphrases with 53% mean accuracy and that GPT-3 achieves a 66% F1-score in detection.
The recent success of large language models for text generation poses a severe threat to academic integrity, as plagiarists can generate realistic paraphrases indistinguishable from original work. However, the role of large autoregressive transformers in generating machine-paraphrased plagiarism and their detection is still developing in the literature. This work explores T5 and GPT-3 for machine-paraphrase generation on scientific articles from arXiv, student theses, and Wikipedia. We evaluate the detection performance of six automated solutions and one commercial plagiarism detection software and perform a human study with 105 participants regarding their detection performance and the quality of generated examples. Our results suggest that large models can rewrite text humans have difficulty identifying as machine-paraphrased (53% mean acc.). Human experts rate the quality of paraphrases generated by GPT-3 as high as original texts (clarity 4.0/5, fluency 4.2/5, coherence 3.8/5). The best-performing detection model (GPT-3) achieves a 66% F1-score in detecting paraphrases.