'Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?' Who will watch the watchmen? On Detecting AI-generated Peer Reviews

Sandeep Kumar, Mohit Sahu, Vardhan Gacche, Tirthankar Ghosal, Asif Ekbal

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

The integrity of the peer-review process is vital for maintaining scientific rigor and trust within the academic community. With the steady increase in the usage of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT in academic writing, there is a growing concern that AI-generated texts could compromise scientific publishing, including peer-reviews. Previous works have focused on generic AI-generated text detection or have presented an approach for estimating the fraction of peer-reviews that can be AI-generated. Our focus here is to solve a real-world problem by assisting the editor or chair in determining whether a review is written by ChatGPT or not. To address this, we introduce the Term Frequency (TF) model, which posits that AI often repeats tokens, and the Review Regeneration (RR) model, which is based on the idea that ChatGPT generates similar outputs upon re-prompting. We stress test these detectors against token attack and paraphrasing. Finally, we propose an effective defensive strategy to reduce the effect of paraphrasing on our models. Our findings suggest both our proposed methods perform better than the other AI text detectors. Our RR model is more robust, although our TF model performs better than the RR model without any attacks.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEMNLP 2024 - 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference
EditorsYaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages22663-22679
Number of pages17
ISBN (Electronic)9798891761643
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024
Event2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2024 - Hybrid, Miami, United States
Duration: Nov 12 2024Nov 16 2024

Publication series

NameEMNLP 2024 - 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference

Conference

Conference2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2024
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityHybrid, Miami
Period11/12/2411/16/24

Funding

Sandeep Kumar acknowledges the Prime Minister Research Fellowship (PMRF) program of the Govt of India for its support. We acknowledge Google for the "Gemma Academic Program GCP Credit Award", which provided Cloud credits to support this research.

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