# Towards Possibilities & Impossibilities of AI-generated Text Detection: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.15264 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15264/

## Key facts

- Cited by 28 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [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)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [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)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08745/) (2018)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [DetectGPT: Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection using Probability Curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11305/) (2023)
- [A Watermark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10226/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Paraphrasing evades detectors of AI-generated text, but retrieval is an effective defense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13408/) (2023)
- [Can AI-Generated Text be Reliably Detected?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11156/) (2023)
- [Robust Distortion-free Watermarks for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15593/) (2023)
- [Provable Robust Watermarking for AI-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17439/) (2023)
- [Poisoning Web-Scale Training Datasets is Practical](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10149/) (2023)
- [Beam Search Strategies for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01806/) (2017)
- [Undetectable Watermarks for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09194/) (2023)
- [RADAR: Robust AI-Text Detection via Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03838/) (2023)
- [On the Reliability of Watermarks for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04634/) (2023)
- [GPT detectors are biased against non-native English writers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02819/) (2023)
- [Automatic Detection of Machine Generated Text: A Critical Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01314/) (2020)
- [Answering Complex Open-Domain Questions with Multi-Hop Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12756/) (2020)
- [Understanding the Capabilities, Limitations, and Societal Impact of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02503/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Spotting LLMs With Binoculars: Zero-Shot Detection of Machine-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12070/) (2024)
- [Mapping the Increasing Use of LLMs in Scientific Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01268/) (2024)
- [Watermark Stealing in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19361/) (2024)
- [Detecting Multimedia Generated by Large AI Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00045/) (2024)
- [Zero-Shot Detection of AI-Generated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15875/) (2024)
- [DetectRL: Benchmarking LLM-Generated Text Detection in Real-World Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23746/) (2024)
- [Are You Getting What You Pay For? Auditing Model Substitution in LLM APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04715/) (2025)
- [TRAP: Targeted Random Adversarial Prompt Honeypot for Black-Box Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12991/) (2024)
- [WaterBench: Towards Holistic Evaluation of Watermarks for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07138/) (2023)
- [Bypassing LLM Watermarks with Color-Aware Substitutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14719/) (2024)
- [Who Wrote This? The Key to Zero-Shot LLM-Generated Text Detection Is GECScore](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04286/) (2024)
- [Detecting AI-Generated Text: Factors Influencing Detectability with Current Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15583/) (2024)
- [AIGS: Generating Science from AI-Powered Automated Falsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11910/) (2024)
- [Beyond Binary: Towards Fine-Grained LLM-Generated Text Detection via Role Recognition and Involvement Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14259/) (2024)
- [Human-LLM Coevolution: Evidence from Academic Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09606/) (2025)
- [A Practical Examination of AI-Generated Text Detectors for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05139/) (2024)
- [A Linguistic Comparison between Human and ChatGPT-Generated Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16587/) (2024)
- [Enhancing LLM Watermark Resilience Against Both Scrubbing and Spoofing Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06274/) (2025)
- [Position: LLM Watermarking Should Align Stakeholders' Incentives for Practical Adoption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18333/) (2025)
- [ChatGPT Code Detection: Techniques for Uncovering the Source of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15512/) (2024)
- [Diversity Boosts AI-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18880/) (2025)
- [How does Misinformation Affect Large Language Model Behaviors and Preferences?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21608/) (2025)
- [Not all tokens are created equal: Perplexity Attention Weighted Networks for AI generated text detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03940/) (2025)
- [Robust and Fine-Grained Detection of AI Generated Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11952/) (2025)
- [On the Detectability of LLM-Generated Text: What Exactly Is LLM-Generated Text?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20810/) (2025)
- [Why AI-Generated Text Detection Fails: Evidence from Explainable AI Beyond Benchmark Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23146/) (2026)
- [Benchmarking of LLM Detection: Comparing Two Competing Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11670/) (2024)
- [Build it, Break it, Repeat: Benchmarking and improving LLM-manipulated disinformation detection in social media posts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09510/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the domain of natural language processing (NLP) with remarkable capabilities of generating human-like text responses. However, despite these advancements, several works in the existing literature have raised serious concerns about the potential misuse of LLMs such as spreading misinformation, generating fake news, plagiarism in academia, and contaminating the web. To address these concerns, a consensus among the research community is to develop algorithmic solutions to detect AI-generated text. The basic idea is that whenever we can tell if the given text is either written by a human or an AI, we can utilize this information to address the above-mentioned concerns. To that end, a plethora of detection frameworks have been proposed, highlighting the possibilities of AI-generated text detection. But in parallel to the development of detection frameworks, researchers have also concentrated on designing strategies to elude detection, i.e., focusing on the impossibilities of AI-generated text detection. This is a crucial step in order to make sure the detection frameworks are robust enough and it is not too easy to fool a detector. Despite the huge interest and the flurry of research in this domain, the community currently lacks a comprehensive analysis of recent developments. In this survey, we aim to provide a concise categorization and overview of current work encompassing both the prospects and the limitations of AI-generated text detection. To enrich the collective knowledge, we engage in an exhaustive discussion on critical and challenging open questions related to ongoing research on AI-generated text detection.