Papers › Can AI-Generated Text be Reliably Detected?
Can AI-Generated Text be Reliably Detected?
Vinu Sankar Sadasivan, Aounon Kumar, Sriram Balasubramanian, Wenxiao Wang, Soheil Feizi
Large Language Models (LLMs) perform impressively well in various applications. However, the potential for misuse of these models in activities such as plagiarism, generating fake news, and spamming has raised concern about their responsible use. Consequently, the reliable detection of AI-generated text has become a critical area of research. AI text detectors have shown to be effective under their specific settings. In this paper, we stress-test the robustness of these AI text detectors in the presence of an attacker. We introduce recursive paraphrasing attack to stress test a wide range of detection schemes, including the ones using the watermarking as well as neural network-based detectors, zero shot classifiers, and retrieval-based detectors. Our experiments conducted on passages, each approximately 300 tokens long, reveal the varying sensitivities of these detectors to our attacks. Our findings indicate that while our recursive paraphrasing method can significantly reduce detection rates, it only slightly degrades text quality in many cases, highlighting potential vulnerabilities in current detection systems in the presence of an attacker. Additionally, we investigate the susceptibility of watermarked LLMs to spoofing attacks aimed at misclassifying human-written text as AI-generated. We demonstrate that an attacker can infer hidden AI text signatures without white-box access to the detection method, potentially leading to reputational risks for LLM developers. Finally, we provide a theoretical framework connecting the AUROC of the best possible detector to the Total Variation distance between human and AI text distributions. This analysis offers insights into the fundamental challenges of reliable detection as language models continue to advance. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/vinusankars/Reliability-of-AI-text-detectors.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
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
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
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