Faculty Development Summer Institute 2026
Guest speaker: Dr. Mohit Iyyer, University of Maryland at College Park.
Title: Detecting and characterizing AI use in collaborative writings
Abstract:
Nowadays, lots of people are using AI to “help” write things. For instance, our recent study finds that ~9% of recently-published American newspaper articles are produced either partially or entirely by LLMs. However, most of this AI use is undisclosed to readers, raising important concerns of transparency and public trust. In this talk, I discuss the broad spectrum of AI-human writing, from minor edits for style/grammar to the generation of large blocks of content, in the context of what might be acceptable and unacceptable to a reader given lack of disclosure.
I’ll then discuss EditLens, an automatic method that performs post-hoc AI detection: given a piece of text, can we tell to what extent AI was used to assist in its writing? Next, I’ll turn to the frontier of AI writing: how good can fully AI-generated writing actually get? To explore this, I’ll introduce autofiction.ai, our new web platform where readers can freely read, rate, and discuss full-length novels
Bio Dr. Mohit Iyyer is an associate professor in computer science at University of Maryland, College Park and a member of CLIP. Previously, he was an associate professor at UMass CS, a Young Investigator at AI2, and a PhD student at UMD CS. His research focuses on natural language processing and large language models. He is currently excited about; (a) long-form text generation, (b) long-context language understanding, (c) AI agents for collaborative writing, and (d) AI-generated text detection.
The afternoon activity is Group Discussions over Ice-Cream + Claude Code Demo + Transformer Lab.