Can We Detect AI-Generated Text? The Mathematics Behind LLM Watermarking
When OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022, a question that had long been theoretical suddenly became urgent: how do we distinguish human-written text from machine-generated prose? The stakes extend beyond academic integrity. Disinformation campaigns, phishing attacks, and automated spam all become exponentially more dangerous when AI can generate convincing content at scale. The most promising answer lies not in training classifiers to spot AI-written text—a cat-and-mouse game that becomes harder as models improve—but in embedding statistical watermarks directly into the generation process itself. ...