[HN Gopher] DetectGPT: Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection
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       DetectGPT: Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection
        
       Author : wwarner
       Score  : 36 points
       Date   : 2023-01-31 19:12 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
        
       | skissane wrote:
       | I had a go at using ChatGPT to write some (not very good)
       | fiction. I give it my story idea, and it gives me a few
       | paragraphs. I edit its output, keeping the stuff I like, deleting
       | things I don't, rewording some things, adding a few sentences of
       | my own. Then I say "Now write a new paragraph about how <new
       | story element>". I read what it says and then I say "Change what
       | you just said so that...". Then I paste that new paragraph into
       | my document at the appropriate point. So the text I'm
       | constructing is neither purely ChatGPT nor purely me, it is a mix
       | of my ideas and its ideas, my words and its words. I wonder if
       | this tool would detect such a text as ChatGPT-generated or not?
        
       | drstrangevibes wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | lostoldsession wrote:
       | Is there really something of value to be had by fighting a war
       | against the coming tide of AI that can spit out whatever you ask
       | for?
       | 
       | To me it looks like old world professors calling the council
       | because the abacus is under threat by the calculator, and we need
       | to ensure the students are absolutely not using the calculator
       | for their abacus studies. This all being despite the fact that
       | society at large is moving as fast as it can to leave the abacus
       | for calculators.
       | 
       | I can't help that but feel that people have lost the forest for
       | the trees. So transfixed on the small steps that they have
       | completely lost track of why we take all those small steps, and
       | the utility that they ultimately provide.
       | 
       | If you want to study whatever subject and become an expert,
       | history or chemical engineering, cool, go ahead. I'm still gonna
       | chose my AI consultant over you in 5-10 years.
        
         | gitfan86 wrote:
         | It is valuable for SPAM filters, and other fraudulent activity.
         | If you get an e-mail from someone you know and it says "I need
         | itunes gift cards right away!" most people know that is a scam.
         | But if you get an e-mail that appears to be following up on a
         | previous conversation, you are much more likely to click on a
         | link in that e-mail.
        
           | rosywoozlechan wrote:
           | I doubt spammers will be the only ones leveraging AI
           | generated text. I'm sure legit marketing people and even
           | administrators and support staff will benefit from using AI
           | written responses. So you're going to filter out valuable
           | emails as well.
        
             | mehlmao wrote:
             | There are no valuable emails from 'legit marketing people',
             | especially so if they're using AI-generated messages to hit
             | you with a firehose.
        
         | mistymountains wrote:
         | Typically, outside experts are useful for out of distribution
         | inference about a particular situation. Fine-tuned generative
         | AI is self evidently not good at generalizing outside the scope
         | of its training data, and becoming reliant on it for this task
         | is foolish. Signed, AI researcher.
        
         | sublinear wrote:
         | > I'm still gonna chose my AI consultant over you in 5-10
         | years.
         | 
         | AI will never replace experts.
         | 
         | Someone still has to curate the firehose of information
         | returned. What's the point then?
         | 
         | AI can only interpolate a response from internet sources, and
         | claims of plagiarism are already coming hard. The internet was
         | never a good source of expertise.
        
         | skor wrote:
         | these kind of comments "I will hire an AI instead of a human"
         | are all quite ironic.
         | 
         | the only things you will find out from asking an AI consultant
         | is what occurred to _you_ to ask it.
         | 
         | Interacting with a human will always give you more ideas,
         | opinions and .. more questions.
         | 
         | And you both can use the AI consultant, and get that important
         | thing done.
        
       | maxutility wrote:
       | > This approach, which we call DetectGPT, does not require
       | training a separate classifier, collecting a dataset of real or
       | generated passages, or explicitly watermarking generated text. It
       | uses only log probabilities computed by the model of interest and
       | random perturbations of the passage from another generic pre-
       | trained language model (e.g, T5).
       | 
       | Very interesting, though the passage above makes me wonder how
       | robust it is to different models or even finetuned variations on
       | models, as even GPT-3(.5) has evolved quite a bit over recent
       | releases since its initial introduction, and there is likely to
       | only be a greater and greater proliferation of models over time.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | rogers18445 wrote:
       | The approach to feed text through a language model and then
       | obtain some kind of vector/hash from it will be leveraged to
       | fingerprint writing and track people.
        
         | flandish wrote:
         | In addition, this can feed a sort of "recaptcha" loop that
         | trains AI to notice AI and create new text less likely to be
         | noticed...
        
       | wwarner wrote:
       | "Unlike human-written text, model-generated text tends to lie in
       | ar- eas where the log probability function has negative curvature
       | (e.g., local maxima of the log probability)."
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | pelasaco wrote:
       | > For example, students may use LLMs to complete written
       | assignments, leaving instructors unable to accurately assess
       | student learning.
       | 
       | I'm one student using GPT to write my written assignments, and I
       | cannot understand what is the issue with that. Even though it
       | enhances the quality of my text, I cannot just copy, paste,
       | submit and profit. I still have to understand what is being
       | written. My workflow is normally the following:
       | 
       | - I ask for an outline to the essay. I use this outline as guide,
       | remove some suggestion, add others that I think are important,
       | rephrase some. I could as well google for similar written essays
       | and do the same.
       | 
       | - Then I ask for the topics, please describe X, Y.. I read it, as
       | a regular source. I understand it, and rewrite it. I add stuff,
       | remove stuff, add references. Normally I endup rewriting
       | everything
       | 
       | - Push the text through Grammarly, rephrase some stuff, check for
       | plagiarism and submit it. I have to read and re-read it, many
       | times.
       | 
       | I have the impression that I've got much more effective avoiding
       | the mechanical part of the task of writing. In another hand my
       | course has some stupid enforcement like 15k words/essay. So they
       | are almost asking me to do some bullshit around the topic instead
       | of going straight to the point. I simply automate the burden. As
       | any software developer would do. I however study philosophy.
       | 
       | So i guess, it will help the universities and education
       | institutions to rethink their traditional way of evaluate written
       | assignments, which probably will be positive. It helps me
       | definitely to write better.
        
         | spikej wrote:
         | The problem is that people aren't doing what you're doing, and
         | ARE just copy/pasting whatever gets spit out. Using it to
         | enhance your wording + thoughts is absolutely the way to make
         | use of these tools.
        
       | janalsncm wrote:
       | From a technical standpoint, this is interesting. Like all other
       | methods I've seen, it requires access to the original model
       | logits, so it can't be used in closed models like GPT-3 except by
       | OpenAI themselves.
       | 
       | But I would classify this into the category of dangerous
       | research. There is a conflict of interest: overstating the
       | effectiveness leads less technical people to give undue trust to
       | what is ultimately a statistical decision. And it shouldn't
       | require repeating how serious the consequences of this decision
       | are.
       | 
       | The most likely outcome is that methods like this are used to
       | diffuse responsibility. The next step is for institutions to buy
       | into one of these classifiers and then to create a punitive
       | "policy".
        
         | canjobear wrote:
         | You can get all the necessary log probabilities from the GPT-3
         | API.
        
           | wwarner wrote:
           | Seems to me you might be able to guess without the weights by
           | manually changing a word or two and seeing how much gpt wants
           | to change.
        
           | janalsncm wrote:
           | Hmm seems you may be right. You can get the top 5 out of the
           | box but you'll need to file for an exception to get any more
           | than that.
        
       | The_Colonel wrote:
       | I can't judge the capabilities of this tool, but I can't help but
       | be skeptical on the mid-long term prospects. The fakes (text,
       | audio, video) will improve to the point of being virtually
       | unrecognizable from real material, no matter how good your fake
       | detection is.
        
         | wwarner wrote:
         | Can some chess players detect when an opponent is using
         | stockfish? Yes, if they're Magnus Carlsen and memorized a
         | particular line of play. This is a bit like that. But yes, I
         | suppose when these tools become so fluent that they basically
         | never need to use the same pattern twice, we're toast.
        
           | The_Colonel wrote:
           | AFAIK top chess players can recognize they're playing against
           | an engine relatively easily. The engines are so far ahead
           | that they often play moves which are "surprising" even for
           | Carlsen, i.e. lines which may seem suboptimal or just unknown
           | - this would normally indicate a weak player, but engines
           | then crush even Carlsen with ease.
           | 
           | But these engines are optimized to win, not to mimic humans,
           | so it's a different story from ChatGPT.
        
           | jsf01 wrote:
           | It's typically not the moves alone that indicate engine use
           | to the other player. The timing is also incredibly important.
           | If it takes you 5 seconds to recapture a piece, where that's
           | the only viable move, but it also takes you 5 seconds to come
           | up with an insane brilliancy that's the result of a deeply
           | calculated line, cheating is a likely explanation.
        
       | gillesjacobs wrote:
       | I found a great way to fool these detectors: piping output
       | generative models.
       | 
       | 1. Generate text by promoting ChatGPT.
       | 
       | 2. Rewrite / copyedit with Wordtune [1], InstaText [2] or Jasper.
       | 
       | This fools GPTZero [4] consistently.
       | 
       | Of course soon these emotive, genre or communication style
       | specialisations will be promptable too by a single model too.
       | Detectors will be integrated as adversarial agents in training.
       | There is no stopping generative text tooling, better adopt and
       | integrated it fully into education and work. Resistance is
       | futile.
       | 
       | 1. https://www.wordtune.com/
       | 
       | 2. https://instatext.io/
       | 
       | 3. https://www.jasper.ai/
       | 
       | 4. https://gptzero.me/
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-31 23:00 UTC)