Papers › A Survey on LLM-Generated Text Detection: Necessity, Methods, and Future Directions

A Survey on LLM-Generated Text Detection: Necessity, Methods, and Future Directions

23 Oct 2023arXiv:2310.14724archive 2025-07-28

Junchao Wu, Shu Yang, Runzhe Zhan, Yulin Yuan, Derek F. Wong, Lidia S. Chao

The powerful ability to understand, follow, and generate complex language emerging from large language models (LLMs) makes LLM-generated text flood many areas of our daily lives at an incredible speed and is widely accepted by humans. As LLMs continue to expand, there is an imperative need to develop detectors that can detect LLM-generated text. This is crucial to mitigate potential misuse of LLMs and safeguard realms like artistic expression and social networks from harmful influence of LLM-generated content. The LLM-generated text detection aims to discern if a piece of text was produced by an LLM, which is essentially a binary classification task. The detector techniques have witnessed notable advancements recently, propelled by innovations in watermarking techniques, statistics-based detectors, neural-base detectors, and human-assisted methods. In this survey, we collate recent research breakthroughs in this area and underscore the pressing need to bolster detector research. We also delve into prevalent datasets, elucidating their limitations and developmental requirements. Furthermore, we analyze various LLM-generated text detection paradigms, shedding light on challenges like out-of-distribution problems, potential attacks, real-world data issues and the lack of effective evaluation framework. Conclusively, we highlight interesting directions for future research in LLM-generated text detection to advance the implementation of responsible artificial intelligence (AI). Our aim with this survey is to provide a clear and comprehensive introduction for newcomers while also offering seasoned researchers a valuable update in the field of LLM-generated text detection. The useful resources are publicly available at: https://github.com/NLP2CT/LLM-generated-Text-Detection.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

nlp2ct/llm-generated-text-detection officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Binary ClassificationLLM-generated Text DetectionText Detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

SPEED

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections