Large Language Models can be Guided to Evade AI-generated Text Detection

Published: 24 May 2024, Last Modified: 17 Sept 2024Accepted by TMLREveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in various tasks and have been extensively utilized by the public. However, the increasing concerns regarding the misuse of LLMs, such as plagiarism and spamming, have led to the development of multiple detectors, including fine-tuned classifiers and statistical methods. In this study, we equip LLMs with prompts, rather than relying on an external paraphraser, to evaluate the vulnerability of these detectors. We propose a novel Substitution-based In-Context example Optimization method (SICO) to automatically construct prompts for evading the detectors. SICO is cost-efficient as it requires only 40 human-written examples and a limited number of LLM inferences to generate a prompt. Moreover, once a task-specific prompt has been constructed, it can be universally used against a wide range of detectors. Extensive experiments across three real-world tasks demonstrate that SICO significantly outperforms the paraphraser baselines and enables GPT-3.5 to successfully evade six detectors, decreasing their AUC by 0.5 on average. Furthermore, a comprehensive human evaluation show that the SICO-generated text achieves human-level readability and task completion rates, while preserving high imperceptibility. Finally, we propose an ensemble approach to enhance the robustness of detectors against SICO attack.
Submission Length: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)
Changes Since Last Submission: - Add an acknowledgement section. - Modify the positions of some figures and tables.
Code: https://github.com/ColinLu50/Evade-GPT-Detector
Supplementary Material: zip
Assigned Action Editor: ~Vlad_Niculae2
Submission Number: 1948
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