Can Humans Detect AI? Mining Textual Signals of AI-Assisted Writing Under Varying Scrutiny Conditions

TL;DR

This study investigates whether awareness of AI detection influences human writing and if judges can distinguish AI-assisted texts from human-written ones, revealing subtle cues beyond measurable text features.

Contribution

It demonstrates that warning about AI detection affects writing in ways not captured by standard text features, and judges can partially identify AI-assisted writing.

Findings

Judges identified warned writers' texts as human 54.13% of the time.

Measurable text features did not differ between warned and unwarned groups.

Judges detect signals beyond standard textual features.

Abstract

This study asks whether the threat of AI detection changes how people write with AI, and whether other people can tell the difference. In a two-phase controlled experiment, 21 participants wrote opinion pieces on remote work using an AI chatbot. Half were randomly warned that their submission would be scanned by an AI detection tool. The other half received no warning. Both groups had access to the same chatbot. In Phase 2, 251 independent judges evaluated 1,999 paired comparisons, each time choosing which document in the pair was written by a human. Judges were not told that both writers had access to AI. Across all evaluations, judges selected the warned writer's document as human 54.13% of the time versus 45.87% for the unwarned writer. A two-sided binomial test rejects chance guessing at p = 0.000243, and the result holds across both writing stances. Yet on every measurable text feature extracted, including AI overlap scores, lexical diversity, sentence structure, and pronoun usage, the two groups were indistinguishable. The judges are picking up on something that feature-based methods do not capture.