Detecting AI Ideas, Not AI Text

What if there was an AI text detector that could recognize that you wrote something based on an idea that AI gave you – even if all the actual writing (i.e., the text) was your own original work? We all know about AI text detectors embarrassing celebrities and politicians, among others – algorithms that have studied the characteristics of AI-created text and can discern those patterns when they surface.

These cases represent simple offloading of a communications task, wherein language models such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini predict the next likely token in a response to a user’s prompt – not by taking a step back and looking at the broad canvas of the problem or proposition first, but just by guessing the next most probable word.

Nonetheless, this patchwork quilt of predictions does eventually yield an underlying structure, according to recent research: the need for adjacent text sections to be coherent and relevant to each other causes a unique signature to develop in the ‘outline’ or higher dimensionality of the work – one that can discern the hand of…