The Effectiveness of Software Designed to Detect AI-Generated Writing: A Comparison of 16 AI Text Detectors

Abstract This study evaluates the accuracy of 16 publicly available AI text detectors in discriminating between AI-generated and human-generated writing. The evaluated documents include 42 undergraduate essays generated by ChatGPT-3.5, 42 generated by ChatGPT-4, and 42 written by students in a first-year composition course without the use of AI. Each detector’s performance was assessed with regard to its overall accuracy, its accuracy with each type of document, its decisiveness (the relative number of uncertain responses), the number of false positives (human-generated papers designated as AI by the detector), and the number of false negatives (AI-generated papers designated as human ). Three detectors – Copyleaks, TurnItIn, and Originality.ai – have high accuracy with all three sets of documents. Although most of the other 13 detectors can distinguish between GPT-3.5 papers and human-generated papers with reasonably high accuracy, they are generally ineffective at distinguishing between GPT-4 papers and those written by undergraduate students. Overall, the detectors that require registration and payment are only slightly more accurate than the others.