We introduce Ghostbuster, a state-of-the-art system for detecting AI-generated text.Our method works by passing documents through a series of weaker language models, running a structured search over possible combinations of their features, and then training a classifier on the selected features to predict whether documents are AI-generated.Crucially, Ghostbuster does not require access to token probabilities from the target model, making it useful for detecting text generated by black-box or unknown models.In conjunction with our model, we release three new datasets of human- and AI-generated text as detection benchmarks in the domains of student essays, creative writing, and news articles. We compare Ghostbuster to several existing detectors, including DetectGPT and GPTZero, as well as a new RoBERTa baseline. Ghostbuster achieves 99.0 F1 when evaluated across domains, which is 5.9 F1 higher than the best preexisting model. It also outperforms all previous approaches in generalization across writing domains (+7.5 F1), prompting strategies (+2.1 F1), and language models (+4.4 F1). We also analyze our system’s robustness to a variety of perturbations and paraphrasing attacks, and evaluate its performance on documents by non-native English speakers.

The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis states that humans tend to distribute information roughly evenly across an utterance or discourse. Early evidence in support of the UID hypothesis came from Genzel and Charniak (2002), which proposed an entropy rate constancy principle based on the probability of English text under n-gram language models. We re-evaluate the claims of Genzel and Charniak (2002) with neural language models, failing to find clear evidence in support of entropy rate constancy. We conduct a range of experiments across datasets, model sizes, and languages and discuss implications for the uniform information density hypothesis and linguistic theories of efficient communication more broadly.