A Ship of Theseus: Curious Cases of Paraphrasing in LLM-Generated Texts

Nafis Irtiza Tripto, Saranya Venkatraman, Dominik Macko, Robert Moro, Ivan Srba, Adaku Uchendu, Thai Le, Dongwon Lee


Abstract
In the realm of text manipulation and linguistic transformation, the question of authorship has been a subject of fascination and philosophical inquiry. Much like the Ship of Theseus paradox, which ponders whether a ship remains the same when each of its original planks is replaced, our research delves into an intriguing question: Does a text retain its original authorship when it undergoes numerous paraphrasing iterations? Specifically, since Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in both the generation of original content and the modification of human-authored texts, a pivotal question emerges concerning the determination of authorship in instances where LLMs or similar paraphrasing tools are employed to rephrase the text–i.e., whether authorship should be attributed to the original human author or the AI-powered tool. Therefore, we embark on a philosophical voyage through the seas of language and authorship to unravel this intricate puzzle. Using a computational approach, we discover that the diminishing performance in text classification models, with each successive paraphrasing iteration, is closely associated with the extent of deviation from the original author’s style, thus provoking a reconsideration of the current notion of authorship.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.357
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6608–6625
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.357
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.357
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nafis Irtiza Tripto, Saranya Venkatraman, Dominik Macko, Robert Moro, Ivan Srba, Adaku Uchendu, Thai Le, and Dongwon Lee. 2024. A Ship of Theseus: Curious Cases of Paraphrasing in LLM-Generated Texts. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6608–6625, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Ship of Theseus: Curious Cases of Paraphrasing in LLM-Generated Texts (Tripto et al., ACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.357.pdf