English

Deepfake Text Detection: Limitations and Opportunities

Cryptography and Security 2022-10-19 v1 Computation and Language Machine Learning

Abstract

Recent advances in generative models for language have enabled the creation of convincing synthetic text or deepfake text. Prior work has demonstrated the potential for misuse of deepfake text to mislead content consumers. Therefore, deepfake text detection, the task of discriminating between human and machine-generated text, is becoming increasingly critical. Several defenses have been proposed for deepfake text detection. However, we lack a thorough understanding of their real-world applicability. In this paper, we collect deepfake text from 4 online services powered by Transformer-based tools to evaluate the generalization ability of the defenses on content in the wild. We develop several low-cost adversarial attacks, and investigate the robustness of existing defenses against an adaptive attacker. We find that many defenses show significant degradation in performance under our evaluation scenarios compared to their original claimed performance. Our evaluation shows that tapping into the semantic information in the text content is a promising approach for improving the robustness and generalization performance of deepfake text detection schemes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2210.09421,
  title  = {Deepfake Text Detection: Limitations and Opportunities},
  author = {Jiameng Pu and Zain Sarwar and Sifat Muhammad Abdullah and Abdullah Rehman and Yoonjin Kim and Parantapa Bhattacharya and Mobin Javed and Bimal Viswanath},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.09421},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Accepted to IEEE S&P 2023; First two authors contributed equally to this work; 18 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T03:51:49.178Z