ChatGPT, is this real? The influence of generative AI on writing style in top-tier cybersecurity papers

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 10 Apr 2026] ChatGPT, is this real? The influence of generative AI on writing style in top-tier cybersecurity papers Daan Vansteenhuyse With the release of ChatGPT in 2022, generative AI has significantly lowered the cost of polishing and rewriting text. Due to its widespread usage, conference organizers instated specific requirements researchers need to adhere to when using GenAI. When asked to rewrite text, GenAI can introduce stylistic changes, often concentrated to a handful of ``marker words`` commonly associated with AI usage. Prior large-scale studies in preprints and biomedical science report post-2022 discontinuities of those marker words and broad linguistic features. This paper investigates whether similar patterns appear in top-tier cybersecurity conference papers (NDSS, USENIX Security, IEEE S\&P, and ACM CCS) over the period 2000-2025. Using text extracted from paper PDFs, we compute lexical and syntactic metrics and track curated marker-word usage. Our findings reveal a gradual long-run drift toward higher lexical complexity and a pronounced post-2022 increase in marker-word usage across all venues showing an emerging trend towards more complex language in cybersecurity papers possibly hindering accessibility. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2604.09316 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.09316v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.09316 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Daan Vansteenhuyse [view email] [v1] Fri, 10 Apr 2026 13:34:34 UTC (2,018 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)