Safeguarding Crowdsourcing Surveys from ChatGPT with Prompt Injection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a prompt injection-based method to detect LLM-generated responses in crowdsourcing surveys, achieving over 93% detection accuracy to maintain survey integrity.

Contribution

It proposes a novel prompt injection technique for identifying LLM responses and provides an open-source tool for survey designers to ensure data quality.

Findings

Detects LLM responses with over 93% accuracy

Effective across various question types and positions

Provides an open-source implementation for practical use

Abstract

ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) have proven useful in crowdsourcing tasks, where they can effectively annotate machine learning training data. However, this means that they also have the potential for misuse, specifically to automatically answer surveys. LLMs can potentially circumvent quality assurance measures, thereby threatening the integrity of methodologies that rely on crowdsourcing surveys. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to detect LLM-generated responses to surveys. The mechanism uses "prompt injection", such as directions that can mislead LLMs into giving predictable responses. We evaluate our technique against a range of question scenarios, types, and positions, and find that it can reliably detect LLM-generated responses with more than 93% effectiveness. We also provide an open-source software to help survey designers use our technique to detect LLM responses. Our work is a step in ensuring that survey methodologies remain rigorous vis-a-vis LLMs.