Dave M. Markowitz
2025
The Consistent Lack of Variance of Psychological Factors Expressed by LLMs and Spambots
Vasudha Varadarajan
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Salvatore Giorgi
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Siddharth Mangalik
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Nikita Soni
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Dave M. Markowitz
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H. Andrew Schwartz
Proceedings of the 1stWorkshop on GenAI Content Detection (GenAIDetect)
In recent years, the proliferation of chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude has led to an increasing volume of AI-generated text. While the text itself is convincingly coherent and human-like, the variety of expressed of human attributes may still be limited. Using theoretical individual differences, the fundamental psychological traits which distinguish people, this study reveals a distinctive characteristic of such content: AI-generations exhibit remarkably limited variation in inferrable psychological traits compared to human-authored texts. We present a review and study across multiple datasets spanning various domains. We find that AI-generated text consistently models the authorship of an “average” human with such little variation that, on aggregate, it is clearly distinguishable from human-written texts using unsupervised methods (i.e., without using ground truth labels). Our results show that (1) fundamental human traits are able to accurately distinguish human- and machine-generated text and (2) current generation capabilities fail to capture a diverse range of human traits