@inproceedings{wang-etal-2026-human,
title = "Is Human-Like Text Liked by Humans? Multilingual Human Detection and Preference Against {AI}",
author = "Wang, Yuxia and
Xing, Rui and
Mansurov, Jonibek and
Puccetti, Giovanni and
Xie, Zhuohan and
Ta, Minh Ngoc and
Geng, Jiahui and
Su, Jinyan and
Abassy, Mervat and
Eletter, Saadeldine and
Elozeiri, Kareem and
Laiyk, Nurkhan and
Goloburda, Maiya and
Mahmoud, Tarek and
Tomar, Raj Vardhan and
Aziz, Alexander and
Koike, Ryuto and
Kaneko, Masahiro and
Shelmanov, Artem and
Artemova, Ekaterina and
Mikhailov, Vladislav and
Tsvigun, Akim and
Aji, Alham Fikri and
Habash, Nizar and
Gurevych, Iryna and
Nakov, Preslav",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.639/",
pages = "14043--14076",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
abstract = "Prior studies have shown that distinguishing text generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) from human-written one is highly challenging for humans, and often no better than random guessing. To verify the generalizability of this finding across languages and domains, we perform an extensive case study to identify the upper bound of human detection accuracy. Across 16 datasets covering 9 languages and 9 domains, 19 annotators achieved an average detection accuracy of 87.6{\%}, thus challenging previous conclusions. We find that major gaps between human and machine text lie in concreteness, cultural nuances, and diversity. Prompting by explicitly explaining the distinctions in the prompts can partially bridge the gaps in over 50{\%} of the cases. However, we also find that humans do not always prefer human-written text, particularly when they cannot clearly identify its source. We release our dataset, the human labels, and the annotator metadata at https://github.com/xnlp-lab/HumanEval-MGT."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="wang-etal-2026-human">
<titleInfo>
<title>Is Human-Like Text Liked by Humans? Multilingual Human Detection and Preference Against AI</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yuxia</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Wang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Rui</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Xing</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jonibek</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Mansurov</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Giovanni</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Puccetti</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Zhuohan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Xie</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Minh</namePart>
<namePart type="given">Ngoc</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Ta</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jiahui</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Geng</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jinyan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Su</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Mervat</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Abassy</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Saadeldine</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Eletter</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Kareem</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Elozeiri</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Nurkhan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Laiyk</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Maiya</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Goloburda</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Tarek</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Mahmoud</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Raj</namePart>
<namePart type="given">Vardhan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Tomar</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Alexander</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Aziz</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Ryuto</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Koike</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Masahiro</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Kaneko</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Artem</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Shelmanov</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Ekaterina</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Artemova</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Vladislav</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Mikhailov</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Akim</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Tsvigun</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Alham</namePart>
<namePart type="given">Fikri</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Aji</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Nizar</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Habash</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Iryna</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Gurevych</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Preslav</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Nakov</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2026-07</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Maria</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Liakata</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Viviane</namePart>
<namePart type="given">P</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Moreira</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jiajun</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">David</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Jurgens</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">San Diego, California, United States</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-390-6</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Prior studies have shown that distinguishing text generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) from human-written one is highly challenging for humans, and often no better than random guessing. To verify the generalizability of this finding across languages and domains, we perform an extensive case study to identify the upper bound of human detection accuracy. Across 16 datasets covering 9 languages and 9 domains, 19 annotators achieved an average detection accuracy of 87.6%, thus challenging previous conclusions. We find that major gaps between human and machine text lie in concreteness, cultural nuances, and diversity. Prompting by explicitly explaining the distinctions in the prompts can partially bridge the gaps in over 50% of the cases. However, we also find that humans do not always prefer human-written text, particularly when they cannot clearly identify its source. We release our dataset, the human labels, and the annotator metadata at https://github.com/xnlp-lab/HumanEval-MGT.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">wang-etal-2026-human</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.639/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2026-07</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>14043</start>
<end>14076</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Is Human-Like Text Liked by Humans? Multilingual Human Detection and Preference Against AI
%A Wang, Yuxia
%A Xing, Rui
%A Mansurov, Jonibek
%A Puccetti, Giovanni
%A Xie, Zhuohan
%A Ta, Minh Ngoc
%A Geng, Jiahui
%A Su, Jinyan
%A Abassy, Mervat
%A Eletter, Saadeldine
%A Elozeiri, Kareem
%A Laiyk, Nurkhan
%A Goloburda, Maiya
%A Mahmoud, Tarek
%A Tomar, Raj Vardhan
%A Aziz, Alexander
%A Koike, Ryuto
%A Kaneko, Masahiro
%A Shelmanov, Artem
%A Artemova, Ekaterina
%A Mikhailov, Vladislav
%A Tsvigun, Akim
%A Aji, Alham Fikri
%A Habash, Nizar
%A Gurevych, Iryna
%A Nakov, Preslav
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F wang-etal-2026-human
%X Prior studies have shown that distinguishing text generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) from human-written one is highly challenging for humans, and often no better than random guessing. To verify the generalizability of this finding across languages and domains, we perform an extensive case study to identify the upper bound of human detection accuracy. Across 16 datasets covering 9 languages and 9 domains, 19 annotators achieved an average detection accuracy of 87.6%, thus challenging previous conclusions. We find that major gaps between human and machine text lie in concreteness, cultural nuances, and diversity. Prompting by explicitly explaining the distinctions in the prompts can partially bridge the gaps in over 50% of the cases. However, we also find that humans do not always prefer human-written text, particularly when they cannot clearly identify its source. We release our dataset, the human labels, and the annotator metadata at https://github.com/xnlp-lab/HumanEval-MGT.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.639/
%P 14043-14076
Markdown (Informal)
[Is Human-Like Text Liked by Humans? Multilingual Human Detection and Preference Against AI](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.639/) (Wang et al., ACL 2026)
ACL
- Yuxia Wang, Rui Xing, Jonibek Mansurov, Giovanni Puccetti, Zhuohan Xie, Minh Ngoc Ta, Jiahui Geng, Jinyan Su, Mervat Abassy, Saadeldine Eletter, Kareem Elozeiri, Nurkhan Laiyk, Maiya Goloburda, Tarek Mahmoud, Raj Vardhan Tomar, Alexander Aziz, Ryuto Koike, Masahiro Kaneko, Artem Shelmanov, Ekaterina Artemova, Vladislav Mikhailov, Akim Tsvigun, Alham Fikri Aji, Nizar Habash, Iryna Gurevych, and Preslav Nakov. 2026. Is Human-Like Text Liked by Humans? Multilingual Human Detection and Preference Against AI. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 14043–14076, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.