MIT Technology Review [free link]: “Debora Weber-Wulff, a professor of media and computing at the University of Applied Sciences, HTW Berlin, worked with a group of researchers from a variety of universities to assess the ability of 14 tools, including Turnitin, GPT Zero, and Compilatio, to detect text written by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Most of these tools work by looking for hallmarks of AI-generated text, including repetition, and then calculating the likelihood that the text was generated by AI. But the team found that all those tested struggled to pick up ChatGPT-generated text that had been slightly rearranged by humans and obfuscated by a paraphrasing tool, suggesting that all students need to do is slightly adapt the essays the AI generates to get past the detectors.

These tools don’t work,” says Weber-Wulff. “They don’t do what they say they do. They’re not detectors of AI.” The researchers assessed the tools by writing short undergraduate-level essays on a variety of subjects, including civil engineering, computer science, economics, history, linguistics, and literature. They wrote the essays themselves to be certain the text wasn’t already online, which would have meant it might already have been used to train ChatGPT…”