What did the dissertation study measure?
The NBER working paper analyzed roughly 226,000 U.S. STEM dissertation abstracts and classified whether a detector flagged text as likely AI-written. The reported 29.4% figure is a detector classification rate in the sampled abstracts, not a verified share of dissertations written by AI.
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A Detector Flagged 29% of New STEM Dissertation Abstracts. What Does That Mean?An NBER working paper finds more AI-detector flags in STEM dissertation abstracts. The result measures classifications, not authorship or misconduct.
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