arXiv Computation and Language

SlopShape: Identifying AI-Generated Commercial Web Content

arXiv AI
6d ago

The uneven rise of AI-generated web content

The study examines how generative AI has reshaped the public web in under five years, using over 5 million crawlable pages. It finds that AI-generated text has risen sharply but unevenly, with higher prevalence on English-language and .com sites, lower on .gov and .edu, and varying by a page’s centrality in the web graph. The authors employ multiple detection tools and a Bayesian hierarchical model to estimate prevalence while accounting for detector errors.

By Adam Visokay, Soumyakanti Pan, Molly Griston, Polina Iasakova, Mark Nepf, Denis Peskoff, Riya Sinha, Jikai Sun, Isabelle Thiara, Letao Wang, Yiwei Wu, Lauren Yan, Tyler H. McCormick
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

AI Writers Have a Consistent Stylometric Footprint, but AI Editors Do Not

The study demonstrates that text produced by large language models (LLMs) leaves a distinct stylometric footprint—primarily increased entropy and lexical diversity—across multiple models and domains. In contrast, AI editing of human text does not replicate this footprint; edited texts show only modest lexical diversity gains and reduced entropy, with lexical density emerging as the key distinguishing feature. Consequently, stylometric analysis can differentiate AI-generated from AI-edited content, but is less effective at distinguishing either from purely human writing.

By Zhengyang Shan, Yukyung Lee, Sophie Hao
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 15

Likelihood Is Not Authorship: Can We Reliably Measure Human Contribution in AI-Assisted Writing?

The paper argues that current AI‑text detection methods, which estimate human contribution by measuring how predictive a user’s prompt is of the final text, can be easily manipulated. By introducing SPECIFICITY PADDING—adding random IDs to the prompt—the authors show that a title‑only request can appear far more human than one containing the article’s key ideas, and that scores can swing dramatically when the evaluator’s view of the prompt is altered. Across a range of large language models, the same documents can be scored as 85 % human or 15 % human depending solely on the prompt used, revealing a fundamental limitation of likelihood‑based metrics for reliably measuring human authorship. whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that likelihood‑based scores cannot reliably establish human contribution without additional evidence of what the person added and how the text was produced."

By Hasan Amin, Zhuoran Lu, Ming Yin