# ArguGPT: evaluating, understanding and identifying argumentative essays generated by GPT models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.07666 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07666/

## Key facts

- Cited by 42 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11446/) (2021)
- [Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07705/) (2022)
- [DetectGPT: Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection using Probability Curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11305/) (2023)
- [Cross-Task Generalization via Natural Language Crowdsourcing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08773/) (2021)
- [Defending Against Neural Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12616/) (2019)
- [Using DeepSpeed and Megatron to Train Megatron-Turing NLG 530B, A Large-Scale Generative Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11990/) (2022)
- [GLTR: Statistical Detection and Visualization of Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04043/) (2019)
- [How Close is ChatGPT to Human Experts? Comparison Corpus, Evaluation, and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07597/) (2023)
- [Unnatural Instructions: Tuning Language Models with (Almost) No Human Labor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09689/) (2022)
- [All That's 'Human' Is Not Gold: Evaluating Human Evaluation of Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00061/) (2021)
- [Evaluation of Text Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14799/) (2020)
- [Mathematical Capabilities of ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13867/) (2023)
- [TURINGBENCH: A Benchmark Environment for Turing Test in the Age of Neural Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13296/) (2021)
- [Is GPT-3 Text Indistinguishable from Human Text? Scarecrow: A Framework for Scrutinizing Machine Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01294/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Can LLM-Generated Misinformation Be Detected?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13788/) (2023)
- [A Survey on LLM-Generated Text Detection: Necessity, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14724/) (2023)
- [OUTFOX: LLM-Generated Essay Detection Through In-Context Learning with Adversarially Generated Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11729/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Detection of LLMs-Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15654/) (2023)
- [GAM-Agent: Game-Theoretic and Uncertainty-Aware Collaboration for Complex Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23399/) (2025)
- [GPT-who: An Information Density-based Machine-Generated Text Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06202/) (2023)
- [DetectRL: Benchmarking LLM-Generated Text Detection in Real-World Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23746/) (2024)
- [On the Detectability of ChatGPT Content: Benchmarking, Methodology, and Evaluation through the Lens of Academic Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05524/) (2023)
- [Who Wrote This? The Key to Zero-Shot LLM-Generated Text Detection Is GECScore](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04286/) (2024)
- [Citation-Enhanced Generation for LLM-based Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16063/) (2024)
- [RepreGuard: Detecting LLM-Generated Text by Revealing Hidden Representation Patterns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13152/) (2025)
- [Detecting AI-Generated Text: Factors Influencing Detectability with Current Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15583/) (2024)
- [Threads of Subtlety: Detecting Machine-Generated Texts Through Discourse Motifs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10586/) (2024)
- [Challenges and Remedies to Privacy and Security in AIGC: Exploring the Potential of Privacy Computing, Blockchain, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00419/) (2023)
- [GPT-Based Models Meet Simulation: How to Efficiently Use Large-Scale Pre-Trained Language Models Across Simulation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13679/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models in Argument Mining: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16383/) (2025)
- [Which Side Are You On? A Multi-task Dataset for End-to-End Argument Summarisation and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03151/) (2024)
- [SilverSpeak: Evading AI-Generated Text Detectors using Homoglyphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11239/) (2024)
- [GenAI Content Detection Task 1: English and Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detection: AI vs. Human](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11012/) (2025)
- [ChatLog: Carefully Evaluating the Evolution of ChatGPT Across Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14106/) (2023)
- [AI "News" Content Farms Are Easy to Make and Hard to Detect: A Case Study in Italian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12128/) (2024)
- [Detecting ChatGPT: A Survey of the State of Detecting ChatGPT-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07689/) (2023)
- [Hidding the Ghostwriters: An Adversarial Evaluation of AI-Generated Student Essay Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00412/) (2024)
- [Generative AI: Implications and Applications for Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07605/) (2023)
- [How You Prompt Matters! Even Task-Oriented Constraints in Instructions Affect LLM-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08369/) (2023)
- [Linguistic Characteristics of AI-Generated Text: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05136/) (2025)
- [BC4LLM: Trusted Artificial Intelligence When Blockchain Meets Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06278/) (2023)
- [Survey on Plagiarism Detection in Large Language Models: The Impact of ChatGPT and Gemini on Academic Integrity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13105/) (2024)
- [Large Language Model Sourcing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10161/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models as 'Hidden Persuaders': Fake Product Reviews are Indistinguishable to Humans and Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13313/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

AI generated content (AIGC) presents considerable challenge to educators around the world. Instructors need to be able to detect such text generated by large language models, either with the naked eye or with the help of some tools. There is also growing need to understand the lexical, syntactic and stylistic features of AIGC. To address these challenges in English language teaching, we first present ArguGPT, a balanced corpus of 4,038 argumentative essays generated by 7 GPT models in response to essay prompts from three sources: (1) in-class or homework exercises, (2) TOEFL and (3) GRE writing tasks. Machine-generated texts are paired with roughly equal number of human-written essays with three score levels matched in essay prompts. We then hire English instructors to distinguish machine essays from human ones. Results show that when first exposed to machine-generated essays, the instructors only have an accuracy of 61% in detecting them. But the number rises to 67% after one round of minimal self-training. Next, we perform linguistic analyses of these essays, which show that machines produce sentences with more complex syntactic structures while human essays tend to be lexically more complex. Finally, we test existing AIGC detectors and build our own detectors using SVMs and RoBERTa. Results suggest that a RoBERTa fine-tuned with the training set of ArguGPT achieves above 90% accuracy in both essay- and sentence-level classification. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive analysis of argumentative essays produced by generative large language models. Machine-authored essays in ArguGPT and our models will be made publicly available at https://github.com/huhailinguist/ArguGPT