SlopShape: Identifying AI-Generated Commercial Web Content

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.

20 pages, 5 figures. Verification artifacts and code: this https URL

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2609.15369 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.15369v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.15369 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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