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Tools to spot AI essays show bias against non-native English speakers

Essays in English written by people from China were branded by text-analysis tools as being generated by artificial intelligence 61 per cent of the time

By Chris Stokel-Walker

23 April 2023

A girl working at a computer

Working out who has produced work isn’t always an easy matter

Tony Tallec/Alamy

Tools to detect if a body of English text has been written by humans or artificial intelligence exhibit bias against people whose primary language isn’t English. The tests frequently misidentify their work as being created by an AI.

Text-generating AI models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4 are being used by some students at schools and universities to create essays that they are passing off as their own work. To stop this, there are many tools designed …

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