{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/gpt-detectors-are-biased-against-non-native","title":"GPT detectors are biased against non-native English writers","arxiv_id":"2304.02819","date":"2023-04-06","proceeding":null,"authors":["Weixin Liang","Mert Yuksekgonul","Yining Mao","Eric Wu","James Zou"],"abstract":"The rapid adoption of generative language models has brought about substantial advancements in digital communication, while simultaneously raising concerns regarding the potential misuse of AI-generated content. Although numerous detection methods have been proposed to differentiate between AI and human-generated content, the fairness and robustness of these detectors remain underexplored. In this study, we evaluate the performance of several widely-used GPT detectors using writing samples from native and non-native English writers. Our findings reveal that these detectors consistently misclassify non-native English writing samples as AI-generated, whereas native writing samples are accurately identified. Furthermore, we demonstrate that simple prompting strategies can not only mitigate this bias but also effectively bypass GPT detectors, suggesting that GPT detectors may unintentionally penalize writers with constrained linguistic expressions. Our results call for a broader conversation about the ethical implications of deploying ChatGPT content detectors and caution against their use in evaluative or educational settings, particularly when they may inadvertently penalize or exclude non-native English speakers from the global discourse. The published version of this study can be accessed at: www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(23)00130-7","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.02819v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.02819v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"gpt-detectors-are-biased-against-non-native","repo_url":"https://github.com/weixin-liang/chatgpt-detector-bias","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"gpt-detectors-are-biased-against-non-native","repo_url":"https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"CC0-1.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"fairness","task_name":"Fairness"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"cosine-annealing","method_name":"Cosine Annealing"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"discriminative-fine-tuning","method_name":"Discriminative Fine-Tuning"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"gpt","method_name":"GPT"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-cosine-annealing","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Cosine Annealing"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2304.02819","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2304.02819","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2304.02819"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/weixin-liang/chatgpt-detector-bias","reach":null},{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"CC0-1.0"}}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"da7564d16d43202a","entry":"pubs_dataset","repo":"weixin-liang/chatgpt-detector-bias","repo_kind":"official","path":"Code/extract_scores.py","file_url":"https://github.com/weixin-liang/chatgpt-detector-bias/blob/HEAD/Code/extract_scores.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"da7564d16d43202a"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}