Almost AI, Almost Human: The Challenge of Detecting AI-Polished Writing

The growing use of large language models (LLMs) for text generation has led to widespread concerns about AI-generated content detection.However, an overlooked challenge is AI-polished text, where human-written content undergoes subtle refinements using AI tools.This raises a critical question: should minimally polished text be classified as AIgenerated?Such classification can lead to false plagiarism accusations and misleading claims about AI prevalence in online content.In this study, we systematically evaluate twelve state-of-the-art AI-text detectors using our AI-Polished-Text Evaluation (APT-Eval) dataset, which contains 15K samples refined at varying AI-involvement levels.Our findings reveal that detectors frequently flag even minimally polished text as AI-generated, struggle to differentiate between degrees of AI involvement, and exhibit biases against older and smaller models.These limitations highlight the urgent need for more nuanced detection methodologies.github.com