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Show HN: Training a model to identify AI web content from structure alone

Show HN: Training a model to identify AI web content from structure alone

1 week ago

Computer Science > Computation and Language

arXiv:2609.15369 (cs)

Title:SlopShape: Identifying AI-Generated Commercial Web Content

Authors:Jochen Madler (Sitefire)
View a PDF of the paper titled SlopShape: Identifying AI-Generated Commercial Web Content, by Jochen Madler (Sitefire)
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Abstract:Word-level detectors identify unedited AI-generated text almost perfectly, but the literature documents their brittleness under rewording, and a word-level score neither characterizes a text nor identifies which AI model wrote it. We ask whether AI-generated text can be identified one level deeper, from structural signatures: how information is presented, in what order, with what evidence, and in what voice. We replicate StoryScope (Russell et al., 2026), which showed such patterns for AI-generated fiction, on commercial content: 2,250 pre-ChatGPT human blog posts from 268 company domains against 11,250 AI mirrors from five frontier models. A 214-feature instrument, applied by an LLM and validated in a human gold-annotation session (human-human kappa 0.928, human-model 0.946), detects AI posts from its 187 structural features alone at 98.0 macro-F1 on held-out companies, unchanged (98.1) when every AI post is reworded by its own model. The signal characterizes and attributes: AI posts share a tidy, self-announcing shape, 79.3% are attributed to the correct source against a 16.7% chance rate, and human posts occupy rare structural configurations. All effects replicate StoryScope's, consistent in direction and larger in magnitude. We release pipeline, instrument, prompts, code, and aggregate artifacts.
Comments: 20 pages, 5 figures. Verification artifacts and code: this https URL. v2: corrected description of brief construction and several reported counts; added AI disclosure
Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.15369 [cs.CL]
  (or arXiv:2609.15369v2 [cs.CL] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.15369
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Jochen Madler [view email]
[v1] Mon, 14 Sep 2026 10:55:30 UTC (357 KB)
[v2] Thu, 17 Sep 2026 06:51:51 UTC (357 KB)
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