ChatGPT or academic scientist? Distinguishing authorship with over 99% accuracy using off-the-shelf machine learning tools

Understand

ChatGPT has enabled access to AI-generated writing for the masses, and within just a few months, this product has disrupted the knowledge economy, initiating a culture shift in the way people work, learn, and write.

• The need to discriminate human writing from AI is now both critical and urgent, particularly in domains like higher education and academic writing, where AI had not been a significant threat or contributor to authorship.
• Addressing this need, we developed a method for discriminating text generated by ChatGPT from (human) academic scientists, relying on prevalent and accessible supervised classification methods.
• We focused on how a particular group of humans, academic scientists, write differently than ChatGPT, and this targeted approach led to the discovery of new features for discriminating (these) humans from AI; as examples, scientists write long paragraphs and have a penchant for equivocal language, frequently using words like but, however, and although.