Cheap, open agents make LLM pollution harder to mitigate

Raluca Rilla, Anne-Marie Nussberger, Rui Mata, Dirk U. Wulff

Large Language Model (LLM) pollution occurs when synthetic responses contaminate data intended to capture human behavior. High deployment costs have so far limited the risk posed by autonomous survey agents. However, open-weight models paired with open-source agentic frameworks may have removed this barrier. We compared the performance and detectability of nine agent configurations, ranging from fully open variants to closed commercial ones. Each agent autonomously completed a survey containing multiple response types yielding various detection checks. Fully open agents ran locally without usage fees and performed competitively with commercial alternatives. Open and commercial agents failed different sets of checks, and no single check reliably detected all agents, but open-text responses discriminated best between agents and humans. These findings identify fully open agents as a distinct risk for LLM pollution and support multilayered detection strategies emphasizing open-text analysis.