ARTFEED — Contemporary Art Intelligence

TELL: Explainable AI Text Detection System

ai-technology · 2026-05-28

Researchers have developed TELL, a novel architecture for AI-generated text detection that prioritizes explainability. Unlike existing systems that output only a numeric score, TELL identifies specific textual 'tells' that indicate whether content is AI or human-written, empowering users like professors to make their own judgments. The system is trained on a custom supervised fine-tuning dataset of domain-specific authorship annotations. This approach addresses the misalignment between current detection outputs and real-world user needs, where a score without explanation is insufficient.

Key facts

  • TELL is a new architecture for explainable AI-generated text detection.
  • It provides users with specific 'tells' indicating AI or human authorship.
  • Current detectors offer only a numeric score without explanation.
  • TELL is trained on a custom SFT dataset of domain-specific authorship annotations.
  • The system aims to empower users to decide authorship using their own judgment.
  • Real-world applicability of current detectors has stalled due to lack of explainability.
  • TELL still outputs a numerical score for comparability with other detectors.
  • The research is published on arXiv as 2605.27921.

Entities

Institutions

  • arXiv

Sources