Tenure-Track Assistant Professor, Visual Computing & CS Education

The Department of Computer Science at Brown University is hiring multiple tenure-track faculty members at the level of Assistant Professor in several strategic research areas. For this search, we a…

Happy 19th Birthday, Ubuntu!

Today is Ubuntu's 19th birthday! Yes, you read that right: nine-freakin’-teenth. October 20, 2004 was when Ubuntu 4.10 arrived, codenamed 'Warty Warthog'

Data Reveals An Infuriating Reason Women Over 40 Are Held Back At Work

A recent study exposes how insidious age discrimination is — and it should make you mad.

Computing the Climate | Computing and society

Don't use AI detectors for anything important

I've noted before that because AI detectors produce false positives, it's unethical to use them to detect cheating. Now there's a new study that shows it's even worse. Not only do AI detectors falsely flag human-written text as AI-written, the way in which they do it is biased. This is

GPT detectors are biased against non-native English writers

The rapid adoption of generative language models has brought about substantial advancements in digital communication, while simultaneously raising concerns regarding the potential misuse of AI-generated content. Although numerous detection methods have been proposed to differentiate between AI and human-generated content, the fairness and robustness of these detectors remain underexplored. In this study, we evaluate the performance of several widely-used GPT detectors using writing samples from native and non-native English writers. Our findings reveal that these detectors consistently misclassify non-native English writing samples as AI-generated, whereas native writing samples are accurately identified. Furthermore, we demonstrate that simple prompting strategies can not only mitigate this bias but also effectively bypass GPT detectors, suggesting that GPT detectors may unintentionally penalize writers with constrained linguistic expressions. Our results call for a broader conversation about the ethical implications of deploying ChatGPT content detectors and caution against their use in evaluative or educational settings, particularly when they may inadvertently penalize or exclude non-native English speakers from the global discourse. The published version of this study can be accessed at: www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(23)00130-7