The texts in the sample set are too short for this to be meaningful. The human-authored TOEFL tests (which compare unfavorably with the eighth-grader essays) ar

The texts in the sample set are too short for this to be meaningful. The human-authored TOEFL tests (which compare unfavorably with the eighth-grader essays) are ~100 words. The longest sample is under 1000 words. GPT detection ought to be optimized for longform texts, so tests of its efficacy should be, too. Perhaps the current detectors on the market are trying to assess writing at the sentence level, but if that's the case then it should be obvious that they will be inaccurate. GMail can write most of a 100-word email for me if I type "Thanks so much" and hit tab. That's a good thing. If GPT is useful as a "productivity" tool, it is for low-level "writing" tasks like this, which aren't really writing at all, just rote responses. Anyone who can access this tool (if they have confidence in its prowess) should use it. Writing proper is about developing ideas, and it's this that people need to be concerned about. It's true that if your college admissions essay is riddled with typos, eyebrows may be raised, but its ultimate significance is whether you can and are willing to reason. If someone is using ChatGPT (or spellcheck, or Grammarly) in order to cultivate the appearance of having "proper English," who cares? But if they're using GPT to avoid thinking altogether, that's a problem. At ~250 words, I guess the only thing you can assess is good formal usage. It's patently obvious that both GPT and non-native English speakers will outperform native speakers on this. Of course, I hope that anyone in the position to assess short-form writing is made aware of this research, and is cautious about GPT detection. On the other hand, it'd be pretty funny if idiosyncratic grammatical choices became the marker of a human hand.