Hidding the Ghostwriters: An Adversarial Evaluation of AI-Generated Student Essay Detection

Xinlin Peng, Ying Zhou, Ben He, Le Sun, Yingfei Sun


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities in text generation tasks. However, the utilization of these models carries inherent risks, including but not limited to plagiarism, the dissemination of fake news, and issues in educational exercises. Although several detectors have been proposed to address these concerns, their effectiveness against adversarial perturbations, specifically in the context of student essay writing, remains largely unexplored. This paper aims to bridge this gap by constructing AIG-ASAP, an AI-generated student essay dataset, employing a range of text perturbation methods that are expected to generate high-quality essays while evading detection. Through empirical experiments, we assess the performance of current AIGC detectors on the AIG-ASAP dataset. The results reveal that the existing detectors can be easily circumvented using straightforward automatic adversarial attacks. Specifically, we explore word substitution and sentence substitution perturbation methods that effectively evade detection while maintaining the quality of the generated essays. This highlights the urgent need for more accurate and robust methods to detect AI-generated student essays in the education domain. Code and data are released for public use.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.644
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10406–10419
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.644
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.644
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinlin Peng, Ying Zhou, Ben He, Le Sun, and Yingfei Sun. 2023. Hidding the Ghostwriters: An Adversarial Evaluation of AI-Generated Student Essay Detection. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 10406–10419, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Hidding the Ghostwriters: An Adversarial Evaluation of AI-Generated Student Essay Detection (Peng et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.644.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.644.mp4