Ars Technica: “Thus far, even AI companies have had trouble coming up with tools that can reliably detect when a piece of writing was generated using a large language model. Now, a group of researchers has established a novel method for estimating LLM usage across a large set of scientific writing by measuring which “excess words” started showing up much more frequently during the LLM era (i.e., 2023 and 2024). The results “suggest that at least 10% of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs,” according to the researchers. In a pre-print paper posted earlier this month, four researchers from Germany’s University of Tubingen and Northwestern University said they were inspired by studies that measured the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic by looking at excess deaths compared to the recent past. By taking a similar look at “excess word usage” after LLM writing tools became widely available in late 2022, the researchers found that “the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words” that was “unprecedented in both quality and quantity.”