# On the Detectability of ChatGPT Content: Benchmarking, Methodology, and Evaluation through the Lens of Academic Writing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05524 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05524/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 122 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [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)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models Are Human-Level Prompt Engineers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01910/) (2022)
- [DetectGPT: Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection using Probability Curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11305/) (2023)
- [A Prompt Pattern Catalog to Enhance Prompt Engineering with ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11382/) (2023)
- [Network In Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4400/) (2013)
- [The NarrativeQA Reading Comprehension Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07040/) (2017)
- [Defending Against Neural Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12616/) (2019)
- [Release Strategies and the Social Impacts of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09203/) (2019)
- [Jailbreaking ChatGPT via Prompt Engineering: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13860/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Multi-step Jailbreaking Privacy Attacks on ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05197/) (2023)
- [Automatic Detection of Generated Text is Easiest when Humans are Fooled](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00650/) (2019)
- [On the Stability of Fine-tuning BERT: Misconceptions, Explanations, and Strong Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04884/) (2020)
- [Generated Knowledge Prompting for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08387/) (2021)
- [Instruction Induction: From Few Examples to Natural Language Task Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10782/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [A Survey on LLM-Generated Text Detection: Necessity, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14724/) (2023)
- [Detecting Multimedia Generated by Large AI Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00045/) (2024)
- [Are We in the AI-Generated Text World Already? Quantifying and Monitoring AIGT on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18148/) (2024)
- [Detecting AI-Generated Text: Factors Influencing Detectability with Current Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15583/) (2024)
- [A Survey of AI-generated Text Forensic Systems: Detection, Attribution, and Characterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01152/) (2024)
- [GenAI Mirage: The Impostor Bias and the Deepfake Detection Challenge in the Era of Artificial Illusions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16220/) (2023)
- [AuthorMist: Evading AI Text Detectors with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08716/) (2025)
- [AI-generated Image Detection: Passive or Watermark?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13553/) (2024)
- [Diversity Boosts AI-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18880/) (2025)
- [The Adversarial AI-Art: Understanding, Generation, Detection, and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14581/) (2024)
- [When Detection Fails: The Power of Fine-Tuned Models to Generate Human-Like Social Media Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09975/) (2025)
- [How Sampling Affects the Detectability of Machine-written texts: A Comprehensive Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13681/) (2025)
- [MOSAIC: Multiple Observers Spotting AI Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07615/) (2024)
- [GigaCheck: Detecting LLM-generated Content via Object-Centric Span Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23728/) (2024)
- [GradEscape: A Gradient-Based Evader Against AI-Generated Text Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08188/) (2025)
- [Spotlights and Blindspots: Evaluating Machine-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16607/) (2026)
- [AI Content Self-Detection for Transformer-based Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17289/) (2023)
- [Measuring Human Involvement in AI-Generated Text: A Case Study on Academic Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03501/) (2025)
- [Two Birds with One Stone: Multi-Task Detection and Attribution of LLM-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14190/) (2025)
- [Stylometry recognizes human and LLM-generated texts in short samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00838/) (2025)
- [StylOch at PAN: Gradient-Boosted Trees with Frequency-Based Stylometric Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12064/) (2025)
- [Explaining Generalization of AI-Generated Text Detectors Through Linguistic Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07974/) (2026)
- [Variation is the Key: A Variation-Based Framework for LLM-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13226/) (2026)
- [AEyeDE: An Attention-Based Attribution Framework for AI-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00016/) (2026)
- [Detecting AI Impostors: How Do Middle Schoolers Identify LLM Agents in a Live Collaborative Setting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30948/) (2026)
- [How Much Were You Told? Measuring External Information in Peer Reviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28041/) (2026)
- [Measuring Artifact Reliance in Machine-Generated Text Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13583/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With ChatGPT under the spotlight, utilizing large language models (LLMs) to assist academic writing has drawn a significant amount of debate in the community. In this paper, we aim to present a comprehensive study of the detectability of ChatGPT-generated content within the academic literature, particularly focusing on the abstracts of scientific papers, to offer holistic support for the future development of LLM applications and policies in academia. Specifically, we first present GPABench2, a benchmarking dataset of over 2.8 million comparative samples of human-written, GPT-written, GPT-completed, and GPT-polished abstracts of scientific writing in computer science, physics, and humanities and social sciences. Second, we explore the methodology for detecting ChatGPT content. We start by examining the unsatisfactory performance of existing ChatGPT detecting tools and the challenges faced by human evaluators (including more than 240 researchers or students). We then test the hand-crafted linguistic features models as a baseline and develop a deep neural framework named CheckGPT to better capture the subtle and deep semantic and linguistic patterns in ChatGPT written literature. Last, we conduct comprehensive experiments to validate the proposed CheckGPT framework in each benchmarking task over different disciplines. To evaluate the detectability of ChatGPT content, we conduct extensive experiments on the transferability, prompt engineering, and robustness of CheckGPT.