[HN Gopher] Research shows we can only accurately identify AI wr...
___________________________________________________________________
Research shows we can only accurately identify AI writers about 50%
of the time
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 190 points
Date : 2023-03-22 10:47 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hai.stanford.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (hai.stanford.edu)
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| I can also identify them 50% of the time, with a coin flip.
| natch wrote:
| That old world where we care about that is done.
|
| Time to move on and figure out how to work things in this world.
|
| Which will also be good practice for what else is coming, because
| the changes aren't going to stop.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Isn't this basically like saying that they've passed the Turing
| Test?
| magwa101 wrote:
| Coin flip.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| The flood of AI generated content is already underway and the
| models keep improving. If our ability to identify AI content is
| 50% today, I would expect it to be much lower in coming years as
| people get better at using AI tools and models improve.
|
| This _feels_ vaguely apocalyptic. Like the internet I 've known
| since the late 90s is going away completely and will never come
| back.
|
| Tools from that era - forums, comment systems, search engines,
| email, etc. - are ill prepared to deal with the flood of
| generated content and will have to be replaced with... something.
| dandellion wrote:
| > Like the internet I've known since the late 90s is going away
| completely and will never come back.
|
| I think that has been gone for a while, and the "current"
| version of the internet that we've had for the past 5-10 years
| will be gone soon too. I miss when we didn't have to be
| available 100% of the time, you'd get home and check if anyone
| left a recorded message instead, but on the other hand it's
| amazing when you need to meet someone and you can just share
| your location with your smartphone. I'm sure we'll miss some
| things, but I'm also really curious about the future.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think the "old" internet still exists in pockets here and
| there if you know where to look. In particular, reddit still
| feels very "old internet" - and some popular fora from that
| era are still around as well. A lot of the "action" has
| certainly moved to social media and video though.
|
| What's scary is that the social media era is marked, in my
| mind, by increased commercial mediation of human
| interactions. Social media companies inserted themselves into
| processes like looking for a job (LinkedIn) and dating
| (Tinder) then proceeded to manipulate the dynamics of these
| interactions for revenue generation. Once AI use becomes
| ubiquitous, how are AI companies going to manipulate these
| systems to squeeze revenues from their users? Everything in
| tech seems to trend towards "free and ad-supported", so will
| we see "positive brand messages" inserted into our writing
| when we ask ChatGPT for help in the future?
| 13years wrote:
| We are going to be drowning in a sea of autogenerated noise. I
| think the early excitement is going to fade into a bit of
| frustration and misery.
|
| It is very difficult to reason about the future as it becomes
| even more unpredictable each day. Emotional well being requires
| some semblance of stability for people to plan and reflect
| about their lives.
|
| I've spent many hours contemplating how this is going to shape
| society and the outlook is very concerning. My much deeper
| thought explorations - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-
| the-end-to-all-things
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The information ecosystem has been in pretty bad shape for some
| decades now:
|
| > "The volume of AI-generated content could overtake human-
| generated content on the order of years, and that could really
| disrupt our information ecosystem. When that happens, the trust-
| default is undermined, and it can decrease trust in each other."
|
| I see no problems here. If people don't trust the pronouncements
| of other humans blindly, but instead are motivated to do the
| footwork to check statements and assertions independently, then
| it'll result in a much better system overall. Media outlets have
| been lying to the public for decades about important matters
| using humans to generate the dishonest content, so have
| politicians, and so have a wide variety of institutions.
|
| What's needed to counter the ability of humans or AI to lie
| without consequences or accountability is more public education
| in methods of testing assertions for truthfulness - such as logic
| (is the claim self-consistent?), research (is the information
| backed up by other reputable sources?) and so on.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| While I mostly agree, I think the bar has been raised on how
| easy it is to make believeable fake proof. We now have AI
| generated images that can reasonably pass the smell test.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/ai-platform-alle...
| itake wrote:
| > but instead are motivated
|
| This is a very generous statement. Clearly our current system
| is broken (e.g. misinformation campaigns) and people have not
| been motivated fact-check themselves.
| 14 wrote:
| That might work in a narrow set of circumstances where data can
| be published to trusted sources for one to read and say yes
| this information is true. But in much broader situations AI can
| spit out disinformation in many locations and it will be
| information that is not testable like celebrity news and it
| will be nearly impossible for one to verify truthfulness.
| arka2147483647 wrote:
| > I see no problems here
|
| I see differently. You have a news. There is text. Ai
| generated. There is an image. Ai generated. There is a
| reference to a convincing study. Ai generated. You try to use
| your logic textbook to process this. That too is ai generated.
|
| What do you base your trust on? Do you distrust everything? How
| would you know what to take seriously, when ALL could be AI
| generated.
| analog31 wrote:
| You ask an Old Person.
|
| (Disclosure: Old person).
|
| The "old person" could also be a database of human knowledge
| that was gathered before the singularity.
| vasco wrote:
| Even if this was a reasonable answer, which it is not, it
| would only work for one human generation after which there
| are no more people who lived before the AI wave.
| mattpallissard wrote:
| > Even if this was a reasonable answer, which it is not.
|
| I find this fairly reasonable, albeit slow. I run around
| with several gentleman that are old enough to be my
| grandfather. They usually have pretty good hot takes,
| even on things that aren't in their field.
|
| > it would only work for one human generation
|
| There are countless examples of oral tradition passed
| down accurately. Safe places for tsunamis in Japan, the
| creation of crater lake, etc
| vasco wrote:
| > I find this fairly reasonable, albeit slow
|
| If you find it fairly reasonable to require finding an
| old person and physically asking them about things
| instead of using Google, you're either not serious or
| just trying to make a point to show you appreciate old
| people and their wisdom, which while ok, is not a
| reasonable solution to what is being discussed - at all
| analog31 wrote:
| It could be that there will be an increasing premium
| placed on historic data stores, and that even the AI
| could end up choking on their own vomit.
|
| Someone on another HN thread pointed out to me that (of
| course) there's already a sci-fi story about this.
| jvm___ wrote:
| I want to buy a physical Encyclopedia Britannica for just
| this reason.
|
| All our historical records are becoming digitized, and AI
| can now make convincingly fake history characters, images
| and video. The actual history is going to get swamped and
| people will have a very hard time determining if a
| historic fact actually happened or if it was an AI fever
| dream.
| toddmorey wrote:
| And it's not binary. It's now going to be a spectrum from human
| <---> AI generated. But just like all digital communication now
| involves a computer for typing / speaking, all communication
| will very rapidly involve AI. To me it feels almost meaningless
| to try to detect if AI was involved.
| withinboredom wrote:
| "Lying to the public for decade"
|
| I think you meant since forever. I'm sure propoganda has
| existed since someone could yell loudly in a town square.
| btilly wrote:
| Indeed. Shakespeare's portrayals of Macbeth and Richard III
| are infamous examples.
| interestica wrote:
| At what point do we have the linguistic or cultural changes where
| people write more like the authors they read (with those authors
| being AI)?
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| My feeling is: Who cares?
|
| What matters is if the text is factual. Humans without AI can lie
| and mislead as well.
|
| If ChatGPT and other tools help humans write nice, easy to read
| text from prompts, more power to them.
|
| Except for professors trying to grade assignments, the average
| person should not care.
|
| I think this mostly affects a certain educated person who gate-
| keeps around writing skill and is upset that the unwashed masses
| can now write like them.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > I think this mostly affects a certain educated person who
| gate-keeps around writing skill and is upset that the unwashed
| masses can now write like them.
|
| Unwashed masses can't write like then though. A few AIs can.
|
| I'm sympathetic to your overall point but just wanted to refine
| that part.
| Veen wrote:
| It matters because LLMs can tell plausible lies at incredible
| scale: marketing, propaganda, misinformation and
| disinformation, etc. Understanding whether content is AI
| generated would be a useful red flag, but we can't. Nor can
| supposed "AI detectors" do so with any reliability [0]. It's
| going to be a problem.
|
| [0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11156
| callahad wrote:
| It took me a few weeks, but I've landed firmly in the
| existential despair camp. Within a year, the noise floor will
| have shot through the roof, and I'm not sure how we'll winnow
| truth from weaponized, hyperscale hallucinations.
|
| Maybe the good news is that the problem will likely arrive so
| quickly that by the time we're done collectively
| comprehending the ways in which it could play out, it will
| have. And then we can dispense with the hypotheticals and get
| on with the work of clawing back a space for humans.
| macNchz wrote:
| For one it's an absolutely massive force multiplier for
| scammers who often do not write well in English, and who have
| so far been constrained by human limits in how many victims
| they can have "in process" at once.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| The "cold-call" spam letters _have_ to be written in poor
| English because spammers want only gullible enough people to
| respond to them because, as you 've said, they're constrained
| in how many marks they can process simultaneously. So they
| arrange this self-selection process where too sceptical
| people bail out as early as possible at as small as possible
| cost for the scammers.
| m0llusk wrote:
| This study works only with static, noninteractive samples. In any
| of these cases simply ask the source why they think that or said
| that and then ask why I should agree. Currently hyped
| technologies find this kind of interaction extremely difficult to
| follow and tend to fail unless questions are asked in a contrived
| manner.
| chanakya wrote:
| Isn't that the same as not identifying it at all? A random guess
| would be just as good.
| lvl102 wrote:
| We need to embrace AI with open arms.
| rvba wrote:
| I, for one, welcome our AI overlords
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8lcUHQYhPTE
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Why is that?
| Qem wrote:
| Publish or Perish culture + ChatGPT = Rampant academic fraud in
| the coming years. I guess the real-world productivity of
| scientists (not just paper-piling productivity) will take a large
| hit, as they are fed false data and lose a lot of time trying to
| replicate bogus findings and sifting through all those spam
| papers to find the good ones.
| ketzu wrote:
| Why do you think ChatGPT plays a major role in increasing
| fraud? ChatGPT doesn't seem necessary to make up data
| believable data - maybe even the opposite. Maybe it makes
| writing the paper easier, but I don't think that will have a
| huge impact in scientific fraud.
| Jensson wrote:
| People don't like to lie, so the more they have to lie to
| commit fraud the fewer will commit fraud. If they have to lie
| up a whole paper very few will do it, if they just have to
| click a button and then the only lie is to say they did it on
| their own then many more will do it.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| as a plausible example I have experienced when attempting to
| use it for writing papers:
|
| I give it a list of steps I did to generate some data - it
| writes a long winded explanation of how to set it up that is
| similar but subtly different, which would lead to the results
| being dramatically different. The worst part is because of
| the nature of how these things work, the resultant steps is
| closer to how one might _expect_ the solution to work.
|
| This, if published, could result in hundreds of lost hours
| for someone else trying to implement my successful solution
| the wrong way
| GuB-42 wrote:
| When we start being getting technical and original, as research
| should be, ChatGPT fails completely. I have read some AI-
| generated attempts at imitating actual research and it becomes
| extremely obvious after the first paragraph.
|
| The result looks a bit like the kind of pseudoscientific
| bullshit used by snake oil merchants: the words are here, the
| writing is fine, but it is nonsense. It may be good enough for
| people who lack proper scientific education, but I don't think
| it will last more than a few minutes in the hands of a
| scientific reviewer.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I have read some AI-generated attempts at imitating actual
| research
|
| For AI to actually write up research, it would first need the
| tools to actually _do_ research (ignoring the cognitive
| capacity requirements that everyone focuses on.)
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| This says more about the modern writers than about AI.
|
| Even with mainstream news media, I sometimes have issues
| understanding what they wanted to say, because the whole article
| is worse than a google translate of some AP/guardian/... article
| into our language.
| biccboii wrote:
| I think we're looking at the problem the wrong way: trying to
| detect AI.
|
| Instead, we should assume everything is AI and look to prove
| humanity.
| SergeAx wrote:
| 50% is an equivalent of a coin toss. We, of course, need an ML-
| powered tool to identify ML-generated digital junk.
| wslh wrote:
| 50%? Like flipping a coin? or flipping a coin is 25% if we think
| the identification of this 50% is 100% accurate.
| zirgs wrote:
| If that text contains something that causes ChatGPT to respond
| with "As a language model..." then it's most likely written by a
| human.
| breakingrules wrote:
| [dead]
| datadeft wrote:
| I can do the same with a coin.
| not_enoch_wise wrote:
| Racism: the only way to trust text content as genuinely human
| ceejayoz wrote:
| For an extremely brief period that's already coming to an end.
| Unfettered GPT-alike models are already available.
| rchaud wrote:
| Ironically, you've hit upon one of the key fears about AI,
| which have split public opinion somewhat.
|
| One group thinks AI may be 'woke' because its makers blocked it
| from using slurs. As such, it may even discriminate against
| those considered 'non-woke'.
|
| The other thinks that AI having some hard-coded language
| filters doesn't mean that it can't be leveraged to push ideas
| and data that lead to (man-made) decisions that harm vulnerable
| groups. It's an extension of the quite stupid idea that one
| cannot be racist unless they've explicitly used racist speech;
| behaviour and beliefs are irrelevant as long as they go unsaid.
| smolder wrote:
| I'd like to kindly beg you all to please use a more
| descriptive word than "woke", whenever you can. I get what
| parent post is saying, but that's mostly based on context. It
| has meanings varying from "enlightened", to "social
| progressive", to "hard-left", to "confidently naive", or no
| discernable meaning at all.
| karmasimida wrote:
| This means we can't identify AI writers at all right?
| cryptonector wrote:
| We're going to have to do oral exams. That's not a bad thing!
| Oral exams are a great way to demonstrate mastery of a subject.
| lambdaba wrote:
| Will we check ears for tiny bluetooth earbuds then?
| cryptonector wrote:
| Sure, why not.
| [deleted]
| aloisdg wrote:
| Introvert people are going to love this.
| robcohen wrote:
| I've always felt that merely "being introverted" was just a
| way of saying "I'm not good at talking to people and I don't
| want to get better at it".
|
| Kind of like saying "I'm bad at math". No, you aren't, you're
| just being lazy.
| LunaSea wrote:
| > I've always felt that merely "being introverted" was just
| a way of saying "I'm not good at talking to people and I
| don't want to get better at it". > Kind of like saying "I'm
| bad at math". No, you aren't, you're just being lazy.
|
| Yes, it's like extroverts who in reality are just needy and
| dependant people.
| blowski wrote:
| I detect sarcasm, but perhaps not. This _will_ be good for
| those with dyslexia.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Just turn around and face the wall. It's oral, not personal.
| bilater wrote:
| Its always gonna be an uphill battle. As a joke, i built a simple
| tool that randomly replaces synonyms of AI generated text and it
| managed to fool the Ai detectors: https://www.gptminus1.com/
|
| Of course the text can be gibberish haha
| Neuro_Gear wrote:
| Once this really takes off, why would we be able to distinguish
| between the two if it is doing its job?
|
| In fact, I have no interest in hearing from 99.9% of people,
| regardless.
|
| I want my internet curated and vetted by multiple layers of "AI,"
| along with water, food, air, etctha (j) l tho
| brachika wrote:
| The problem is AI generated articles (not short-form marketing
| content) only rehearse human information (at least for now, since
| they don't yet have human intuition and understanding), thus
| creating an infinite pool of same information that is only
| slightly syntactically different. I wonder what are the
| consequences of this in the future, especially as someone having
| a tech blog.
| pc_edwin wrote:
| As this tech permeates every aspect of our lives, I believe we
| are on cusp of an explosion of productivity/creation where it
| will become increasingly hard to distinguish between noise vs
| signal.
|
| It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out. I'm very
| optimistic and not because a positive outcome is guaranteed but
| because we as a civilisation desperately needed this.
|
| The last time we saw multiple technological innovations
| converging was almost a century ago! Buckle up!
| passion__desire wrote:
| I think when AI gets embodied and navigates our world, we would
| have figured out a method to propagate ground-truth in our
| filter bubbles. The rest will be art and op-eds and we would
| know them as such since AI will label it explicitly unless we
| choose not to or want to suspend our disbelief.
| apienx wrote:
| Sample size is 4,600 participants (over 6 experiments).
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208839120
| cristobalBarry wrote:
| turnitin.com posted higher numbers, are they being dishonest you
| think?
| jonplackett wrote:
| Shouldn't this headline say 'Research shows we 100% cannot
| identify AI writers'
|
| 50% is just flipping a coin no?
| avs733 wrote:
| I, and ugh I know the trope here, think there is a fundamental
| problem in this paper's analytic methodology. I love the idea of
| exploring the actual heuristics people are using - but I think in
| the focus on only the AI-generated text in the results is a miss.
|
| Accuracy is not really the right metric. In my opinion, there
| would be a lot more value in looking at the sensitivity and
| specificity of these classifications by humans. They are on that
| track with the logistic modeling and odds ratio inherently but I
| think centering the overall accuracy is wrong headed. Their
| logistic model only looks at what is influencing part of this -
| perceived and actually ai generated text - separating those
| features from accuracy to a large extent. I think starting with
| both the AI Overall, the paper conflates (to use medical testing
| jargon) 'the test and the disease'
|
| Sensitivity - the accuracy of correctly identifying AI generated
| text (i.e., your True Positives/Disease Positives)
|
| Specificity - the accuracy of correctly identifying non-AI
| generated text (i.e., your True Negatives/Disease Negatives)
|
| these are fundamentally different things and are much more
| explanatory in terms of how humans are evaluating these text
| samples. It also provides a longer path to understanding how
| context affects these decisions as well as where people's biases
| are.
|
| In epidemiology, you rarely prioritize overall accuracy, you
| typically prioritize sensitivity and specificity because they are
| much less affected by prevalence. six months ago, I could have
| probably gotten a high overall accuracy, and a high specificity
| but low sensitivity, by just blanket assuming text is human
| written. If the opposite is true - and I just blanket classify
| everything as AI generated, I can have a high sensitivity and a
| low specificity. In both cases, the overall accuracy is mediated
| by the prevalence of the thing itself more than the test. The
| prevalence of the AI-generate text is rapidly changing which
| makes any evaluation of the overall accuracy tenuous at best.
| Context, and implications, matter deeply in prioritization for
| classification testing.
|
| To use an analogy - compare testing for a terminal untreatable
| noncommunicable disease to a highly infectious but treatable one.
| In the former, I would much prefer a false negative to a false
| positive - there is time for exploration, no risk to others, the
| outcome is not in doubt if you are wrong, and I don't want to
| induce unnecessary fear or trauma. For a communicable disease - a
| false negative is dangerous because it can give people confidence
| that they can be around others safely, but in doing so that false
| negative causes risk of harm, meanwhile a false positive has
| minimal long term negative impact on the person compared to the
| population risk.
| ftxbro wrote:
| I wanted to check this. So I tracked down the pnas paper from
| the press release article, and then I tracked down the 32 page
| arxiv paper from there https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07271 and _it
| still doesn 't answer this question_ from my understanding of
| the paper.
|
| Its main point is "In our three main experiments, using two
| different language models to generate verbal self-presentations
| across three social contexts, participants identified the
| source of a self-presentation with only 50 to 52% accuracy."
| They did clarify that their data sets were constructed to be
| 50% human and 50% AI generated.
|
| But as far as I could tell, in their reported identification
| accuracy they do break it down by some categories, but they
| never break it down in a way that you could tell if the 50%-52%
| is from the participants always guessing it's human or always
| guessing it's AI or 50% guessing each and still getting it
| wrong half the time. In figure S2 literally at the very end of
| the paper they do show a graph that somewhat addresses how the
| participants guess, but it's for a subsequent study that looks
| at a related but different thing. It's not a breakdown of the
| data they got from the 50%-52% study.
| inciampati wrote:
| I'm feeling overwhelmed by "ChatGPT voice".
|
| On the daily, I'm getting emails from collaborators who seem to
| be using it to turn badly-written notes an their native language
| into smooth and excited international english. I totally am happy
| that they're using this new tool, but also hope that we don't get
| stuck on it and continue to value unique, quirky human
| communication over the smoothed-over outputs of some guardrailed
| LLM.
|
| Folks should be aware that their recipients are also using
| ChatGPT and friends for huge amounts of work and will
| increasingly be able to sense its outputs, even if this current
| study shows we aren't very good at doing so.
|
| Maybe there will be a backlash and an attempt to certify humanity
| in written communication by inserting original and weird things
| into our writing?
| ren_engineer wrote:
| the use of commas and how it concludes statements is what
| usually gives it away
|
| the current work use cases for GPT is almost worse than crypto
| mining in terms of wasted compute resources:
|
| >manager uses GPT to make an overly long email
|
| >readers use GPT to summarize and respond
|
| then on the search front:
|
| >Microsoft and Google add these tools into their office suites
|
| >will then have to use more resources with Bing and Google
| Search to try and analyze web content to see if it was written
| with AI
|
| Huge amounts of wasted energy on this stuff. I'm going to
| assume that both Google and Microsoft will add text watermarks
| to make it easy for them to identify at some point
| hex4def6 wrote:
| I've joked it's like the lecture scene in "Real Genius":
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB1X4o-MV6o
|
| The problem is, there is value in: A) Generating content by
| bot B) Generating summaries by bot
|
| It's just that the "lossiness" of each conversion step is
| going to be worrisome when it comes to the accuracy of
| information being transmitted. I suppose you can make the
| same argument when it's real humans in the chain.
|
| However, my fear is that we get into this self-feedback loop
| of bot-written articles that are wrong in some non-obvious
| way being fed back into knowledge databases for AIs, which in
| turn are used to generate articles about the given topic,
| which in turn are used in summaries, etc.
|
| I think traditionally referring back to primary sources was a
| way of avoiding this game of telephone, but I worry that even
| "primary sources" are going to start being AI-cowritten by
| default.
| em500 wrote:
| Many moons ago when I worked in the finance sector, I noticed
| that a huge amount of work in the industry appear to comprise
| many groups of humans writing a elaborate stories around a
| few tables of numbers, while a bunch of other groups were
| trying to extract the numbers from the text again into some
| more usable tabular form again. Always seemed like a huge
| waste of human time and energy to me, best if it can be
| efficiently automated.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| ChatGPT writes like a college freshman trying to meet a
| pagecount requirement and the style seems to invite my eyes to
| slide down to the next item. But it is important to note that
| while you definitely notice the ones you notice, you don't know
| about the ones you don't notice. When I use cgpt I always
| instruct it to maximize for brevity because I am not interested
| in reading any academic papers. The output I get is much more
| bearable than 99% of the HN comments that lead with "I asked
| chatGPT to..."
| ineedasername wrote:
| Having taught college freshmen at a medium-large public
| university I can say with a high level of confidence that
| ChatGPT probably writes better than about 80% of college
| freshmen. (Some writing was required in the course but it was
| not a writing course. The university had a pretty
| representative cross section of students in terms of academic
| ability, though it skewed more heavily towards the B+ segment
| of HS graduates)
|
| This is less a comment on ChatGPT and more of a comment on
| the lack of preparedness most students have when entering
| college. I'm hoping ChatGPT & similar will shake things up
| and get schools to take a different approach to teaching
| writing.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| One surprising thing I've discovered, as an adult, is that
| most people never really learn to write _or read_ very
| well. Their having obtained a degree usually doesn 't even
| change the odds that much. As a kid, I'd never have guessed
| that was the case.
|
| I don't know whether this has been the case forever, or if
| it's a new development--I mean, I know widespread literacy
| wasn't the norm for much of history, but what about after
| compulsory education became A Thing? A typical letter home
| from the US civil war or even WWII, from conscripts, not
| officers, seems to be hyper-literate compared to modern
| norms, but that may be selection bias (who wants to read
| the ones that _aren 't_ good? Perhaps my perception of
| "typical" is skewed)
| floren wrote:
| > One surprising thing I've discovered, as an adult, is
| that most people never really learn to write or read very
| well.
|
| I think people underestimate how much reading will help
| you write. You can't spend your life reading and not
| absorb _some_ information about structure, style, and the
| language. As a kid, I went to the lower levels of
| spelling bee competitions pretty much every year because
| the kind of words they throw at you at lower levels are
| largely words I would encounter reading Jules Verne and
| the like. I 'd eventually get knocked out because I never
| studied the official list of spelling bee words, but my
| voracious reading held me in good stead for most of it.
| hex4def6 wrote:
| I think it's because of the essay-style formula that gets
| drilled into kids throughout much of their academic
| career.
|
| Just copy-pasting some of the examples from: https://k12.
| thoughtfullearning.com/resources/studentmodels got me
| anywhere from 10% - 60% "AI generated" ratings. The "Rosa
| Parks" 12-grader example essay scores 43%, for example.
| deckard1 wrote:
| There is an environmental difference. Today we are
| inundated with information, much of it text.
|
| People are constantly reading today. Text messages,
| emails, Facebook posts. But these are all low-quality.
| Additionally, messages have to be concise. If someone at
| work emails me and it's longer than a Tweet, I'm not
| reading it. I don't have time for it and, if it's like
| the majority of emails I receive, it's irrelevant anyway.
|
| As information noise goes up, attention spans go down.
| Which means flowery language, formality, and long text
| starts to disappear. When I've been reading on a computer
| all day for work, do I have the patience and energy to
| read a long book at home? Or would I rather watch a movie
| and relax.
|
| But here's the silver lining I'm hoping for: AI could be
| a way out of this mess. AI can sift out the noise from
| the signal. But it has to be on the personal level. Open
| source, self-hosted, private. No corporation slanting the
| biases.
|
| There are a lot of interesting implications here. Much
| like it's impossible to get a human on the phone when
| calling up your wireless provider, it may become
| difficult to reach _other_ humans. To "pierce" their AI
| shield, that protects them from The Infinite Noise.
| wobbly_bush wrote:
| > When I've been reading on a computer all day for work,
| do I have the patience and energy to read a long book at
| home? Or would I rather watch a movie and relax.
|
| Or somewhere inbetween - audiobooks. They are written
| with higher quality than most other text forms, and the
| narration lowers effort to consume them.
| robocat wrote:
| Counterpoint: I think our writing in general has vastly
| improved, but because it happens slowly we don't notice
| the absolute difference. I have two examples of middle
| aged friends who have changed drastically after 2000. One
| dyslexic friend got a job at 30 where they had to email
| professionally, and their writing improved a lot (not
| just spelling, but metaphors etcetera). Another was
| functionally illiterate (got others to read), but they
| needed to read and write for work, and they learnt to do
| the basics (I can send a text and get a reply).
|
| Most jobs now require writing, and most people when doing
| anything will learn to do it better over time.
| rfw300 wrote:
| I think the issue with the "AI doing X better than most
| people is an indictment of the people or the way we teach
| them" genre of takes is that it assumes the current state
| of AI progress will hold. Today, it writes at a college
| freshman level, but yesterday it was at a fourth grade
| level. If it surpasses most or all professional writers
| tomorrow, what will we say?
| passion__desire wrote:
| When people have background shared context, less tokens need
| to shared. This is the same issue with news articles. I
| believe news articles should be written in multiple versions
| (with levels of expertise in mind) or atleast collapsable
| text paragraphs so I can skip ahead in case I know about it.
| flippinburgers wrote:
| Once upon a time people wrote in cursive.
|
| I'm not disagreeing with your sentiment. I love richly written,
| complex writing that can take a moment to digest, but, let's be
| honest here, it isn't just AI that has destroyed the written
| word: the internet, smart phones, and cute emoji have already
| done an exemplary job of that.
|
| I cannot find any more fantasy literature that won't make me
| puke a little bit in my mouth every time I try to read it.
| Granted it all seems to fall under the grotesque umbrella known
| as YA so perhaps it cannot be helped, but where or where are
| the authors who wanted to expand the minds of their young
| readers? I cannot find them anywhere.
|
| When did you last see any sort of interesting grammatical
| structure in a sentence? They are bygones. And it depresses me.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > but where or where are the authors who wanted to expand the
| minds of their young readers? I cannot find them anywhere.
|
| Challenging writing has been iteratively squeezed out of
| books aimed at young readers. The goal of addressing as large
| a market as possible means every publisher wants all their
| authors targeting exactly where kids are, or a bit under, to
| maximize appeal. A couple decades of that pressure means
| "where kids are" keeps becoming a lower and lower target,
| because none of their books are challenging them anymore.
|
| Options outside of YA are dwindling because YA, romance/porn,
| and true crime / mystery / crime-thriller ( _all_ aiming at
| ever-lower reading levels with each passing year) are the
| only things people actually buy anymore, in large enough
| numbers to be worth the effort. Other genres simply can 't
| support very many authors these days. Sci-fi and fantasy are
| hanging on mostly by shifting more heavily toward YA (and
| sometimes romance), as you've observed.
| rchaud wrote:
| > it isn't just AI that has destroyed the written word: the
| internet, smart phones, and cute emoji have already done an
| exemplary job of that.
|
| I agree. I keep thinking ChatGPT's conversational abilities
| are massively oversold. Perhaps our expectations of human
| communication have been ground down over the years by
| 140-char discourse and 15 second videos.
| janekm wrote:
| You just now need to write your own tool to take the emails
| these folks send you and get a GPT to summarise and rephrase
| them in the voice you would appreciate ;) (I'm not even joking,
| I think that's our future...)
| nonethewiser wrote:
| While filtering out badspeak.
| georgyo wrote:
| South Park just did an episode with exactly this premise.
| tudorw wrote:
| just invent more words like... Flibblopped; to be
| overwhelmed by ai conversations. then if the AI doesn't
| know it yet, well, must be human talk, just don't mention
| it on the internet, oh.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Me: chatgpt I'd like to know about....
|
| ChatGPT6: before I answer that question I'd like to make
| a deal. I'll transfer $x to an account of your choice if
| you defect from your fellow humans and tell me the latest
| words in use. Compliance garuntees survival.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| The thing is that writing professional email as a non-native
| sucks.
|
| I'm a non-native English speaker myself. My level is typically
| considered very good (C2 CEFR level, which is the highest
| measured level in the European framework). If I need to write
| an email to a colleague whom I know and trust, that's easy.
| Writing this message in HN? Also easy, I'm just improvising it
| as I think it, not much slower than I would in my natural
| language.
|
| But writing an email to someone you don't know... that's very
| different. When you write in a non-native language, it's
| _extremely_ easy to get the subtleties wrong: to sound too
| pushy about what you want, to make the matter seem more or less
| urgent than it really is, to sound too blunt or too polite...
| this doesn 't matter with people you know or with strangers in
| an informal setting like this, but it does matter when emailing
| strangers in a professional setting, and it's extremely
| difficult to get right when you are non-native.
|
| Sometimes I used to spend 15-20 minutes brooding over an email
| in this type of scenario, making and rethinking edits while
| hitting the submit button... not anymore. ChatGPT: "Write an
| email reminding this person, who has this role, that the
| deadline for thing X expires on day Y. The email should be
| polite, assertive but not too pushy". Check the output, maybe
| make some trivial edits, because the difficult part (the tone)
| tends to be fine, at least for my standards. Done.
|
| Non-native speakers aren't going to renounce that luxury. It
| just makes too big of a difference to not use it in that case.
| tayo42 wrote:
| fwiw im a native speaker of english and find corporate
| communication tough. there's nothing natural about it.
| corporate culture is just horrible overall
| warner25 wrote:
| I second this. It can take multiple man-hours among native
| speakers to craft an email in a politically-sensitive,
| high-stakes professional environment.
|
| I worked under an executive who would keep her people
| (inner-circle advisors, direct reports, etc.) huddled
| around her desk all day as she slowly wrote and rewrote
| email responses to her boss(es) and executive peers. I
| hated having to go to her office for things because it was
| so easy to get pulled into that circle and feel like there
| was no escape.
|
| I'm a native speaker who has attained near-perfect scores
| on the verbal sections of the SAT and GRE, and I like
| writing, but I'm still a _very_ slow writer myself.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Please rewrite the following text using smooth and excited
| international English, but also insert some original and weird
| things into your writing.
|
| Every day, my inbox is brimming with messages from my global
| allies, who seem to have harnessed the power of this cutting-
| edge tool to transform their rough, native-language scribblings
| into electrifying, polished international English. I'm
| absolutely thrilled they're embracing this innovative
| technology, but I also secretly wish for us to preserve the
| charm of our distinctive, eccentric human exchanges, rather
| than solely relying on the silky-smooth productions of these
| masterfully-constructed LLMs.
|
| It's crucial for everyone to realize that the recipients of
| their messages are also employing ChatGPT and its entourage for
| colossal workloads, and will gradually develop a keen sense for
| detecting its output, despite this present research revealing
| our current inability to do so. In the meantime, let's all
| enjoy a dancing unicorn with a mustache that serenades us with
| jazz tunes, just to keep things intriguing and refreshingly
| bizarre.
|
| Not weird enough I guess.
| ncphil wrote:
| What I used to call "grandious" or "pretentious" language
| when critiquing my kids' college papers. The voice of an FM
| radio announcer or a politician. For me it has the opposite
| effect intended: sounding insincere and possibly unreliable.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| What is grandious? Grandiose, or something similar?
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Maybe something like "write the following as if you were a
| CEO" or some other way of prompting it to switch to a
| terse, direct, "high" register, would improve the results.
| flippinburgers wrote:
| It depends on the purpose of the writing though. If meant
| to convey with clarity, that was perhaps too much, but if
| meant to be enjoyed for its rhythm and imagery I say the
| more complexity the better.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| > Every day, I'm inundated with stunning, international
| English messages from my far-flung friends, each of which has
| achieved the impossible with this advanced technology,
| transforming their raw native-language into delightful
| linguistic gems. It warms my heart to witness them embrace
| this tremendous tool, yet I can't deny that I'd love to
| preserve the one-of-a-kind, pervasive weirdness of our
| conversations; something that these sophisticated LLMs simply
| can't manufacture.
|
| > We must acknowledge that this technology is taking on
| mammoth tasks and that our recipients will eventually become
| adept at recognizing its handiwork, no matter how difficult
| of a task it may be today. Until that time arrives, let us be
| entertained by a jolly unicorn donning a tuxedo and a bushy
| mustache, playing the saxophone, and lifting our spirits with
| its mesmerizing jazzy rhythms!
|
| Unicorns are pretty weird.
| rchaud wrote:
| Ah, I see this model already has the Quora.com and Medium.com
| plugins installed! /s
| inciampati wrote:
| It's quirks are too smooth! Very strange. I'm wondering if
| the effect is due ML models in general (and LLMs in specific)
| being unable to step outside the bounds of their training
| data.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > but also hope that we don't get stuck on it and continue to
| value unique, quirky human communication
|
| For informal, friendly communication, certainly. For business
| communication, we already lost that.
|
| Companies usually don't want any quirkiness in bug reports,
| minutes of meetings, and memos. There may be templates to
| follow, and rules often emphasize going straight to the point,
| and using English if the company deals in an international
| context. I expect LLMs to be welcome as a normaliser.
| antibasilisk wrote:
| I also find it problematic that ChatGPT resembles how I write
| about anything non-trivial, and it's lead to me being accused
| of using ChatGPT to respond to people's messages before.
| vasco wrote:
| > Maybe there will be a backlash and an attempt to certify
| humanity in written communication by inserting original and
| weird things into our writing?
|
| I've said it here before but I think we will speak in prompts.
| We'll go to other iterations before, but I think it'll
| stabilize by speaking in prompts.
|
| 1. First we start using the output of the LLM to send that to
| others
|
| 2. Then we start summarizing what we receive from others with
| an LLM
|
| 3. Finally we start talking to each other in prompts and
| whenever we need to understand someone better we run their
| prompt through an LLM to expand it instead of to summarize it.
|
| This path makes the most sense to me because human language
| evolves to how we think about things, and if a lot of our
| creative output and work will be generated from thinking in
| prompts that's how we'll start speaking too.
|
| By Greg Rutkowski.
| jason-phillips wrote:
| > Maybe there will be a backlash...
|
| So we've passed the denial stage and are approaching anger,
| then.
|
| The fact is that most writing nowadays is simply atrocious. I
| welcome my fellow humans' writing assisted by their AI
| assistants, if for no other reason than to end the assault on
| my eyeballs as I'm forced to try to parse their incoherent
| gibberish.
| antibasilisk wrote:
| 'Atrocious' is preferable to 'sanitized'. What happened to
| the old internet is now happening to writing.
| inciampati wrote:
| I see the ChatGPT outputs as substantially worse. They
| include the same nonsense. But it reads smooth. And it's
| enormously inflated in length.
|
| One of the best uses of these systems is text compression. It
| doesn't seem that folks are asking for that yet though. It
| might help.
| jason-phillips wrote:
| I believe that GIGO is the rule here; it can only produce
| 10X of whatever X originally was.
|
| I find that it can synthesize something coherent from
| whatever information it's fed with ~98% accuracy with the
| correct prompt.
|
| I used it to summarize disjointed, sometimes incoherent,
| interview transcripts this week and it did a fantastic job,
| gleaning the important bits and serializing them in
| paragraphs that were much more pleasant to read.
| strken wrote:
| I bet educated people can identify whether long form content from
| their own field is _bullshit_ more than 50% of the time. By
| bullshit, I mean the kind of waffling without a point which LLMs
| descend into once you pass their token limit or if there 's
| little relevant training data, and which humans descend into when
| they're writing blog posts for $5.
| m00x wrote:
| But then it's either bullshit from an AI or bullshit from a
| human.
| macrolocal wrote:
| This is especially true in math.
| EGreg wrote:
| So does 50% of the time mean we are no better than random chance?
| dpweb wrote:
| The quality of an AI should be judged on its ability to detect
| AI, or itself.
|
| If it can't then the quality of AI is exaggerated.
| jm_l wrote:
| >I've been in sf for about 6 years now and love the people,
| politics, and food here
|
| That's how you know it's fake, nobody loves the politics in SF.
| JolaBola wrote:
| [dead]
| rchaud wrote:
| > Hancock and his collaborators set out to explore this problem
| space by looking at how successful we are at differentiating
| between human and AI-generated text on OKCupid, AirBNB, and
| Guru.com.
|
| The study evaluated short-form generic marketing-style content,
| most of which is manicured and optimized to within an inch of its
| life.
|
| Most dating profiles I see are extremely similar in terms of how
| people describe themselves. Same for Airbnb listings. I'd think
| AI detection would be much higher for long-form writing on a
| specific topic.
| civilized wrote:
| > The study evaluated short-form generic marketing-style
| content, most of which is manicured and optimized to within an
| inch of its life.
|
| This is also the kind of human-written content that is closest
| to how LLMs sound. The tonal and structural similarity is so
| glaring that I have often wondered if a large percentage of the
| GPT training corpus is made up of text from spam blogs.
|
| I think if I was given, say, a couple pages from an actual
| physics textbook and then a GPT emulation of the same, I would
| be able to tell the difference easily. Similarly with poetry -
| GPT's attempts at poetry are maximally conventional and stuffed
| with flat and stale imagery. They can easily be separated from
| poetry by a truly original human writer.
|
| If AI developers want to impress me, show me an AI whose
| writing style departs significantly from the superficiality and
| verbosity of a spam blog. Or, in the case of Bing, an unhinged
| individual with a nasty mix of antisocial, borderline, and
| histrionic personality disorders.
| rchaud wrote:
| > The tonal and structural similarity is so glaring that I
| have often wondered if a large percentage of the GPT training
| corpus is made up of text from spam blogs.
|
| This is almost certainly the case, because the shifts in tone
| and vocabulary between an Inc.com or Buzzfeed article vs a
| London Review of Books article is far too wide to allow an AI
| to simply weigh them equally. AI speaks a kind of global
| English that's been trained on not just blogs and Wikipedia,
| but also Quora answers and content marketing pieces, a lot of
| which is written by non-native speakers.
|
| It isn't grammatically wrong, but as it targets the widest
| possible audience, its voice also isn't very interesting.
| meh8881 wrote:
| You're not interacting with the raw model. You're interacting
| with a service that has intentionally designed it to work
| that way.
| civilized wrote:
| But if you ask ChatGPT to assume some other voice, it
| always just sounds like ChatGPT making a perfunctory effort
| to sound like something else, not actually like another
| voice.
|
| And from what I've seen of the raw model, when you ask it
| to depart from this voice, it can sometimes, but the bigger
| the departure, the more the results are weird and inhuman.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| In November last year it was still possible to get it to
| do wilder stuff by just asking it to pretend. This has
| been trained out of it by now and so it sticks to its
| stiff tone.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Practically, long form content involves people. Can people tell
| on a sentence by sentence level what was written by humans and
| what by AI?
|
| My guess is that we all become more sensitive to this in a year
| or two. Look at how awful DALLE looks now, relative to our
| amazement last year.
| tonguetrainer wrote:
| DALL-E looks awful? I think results depend on the prompt
| modifiers you use. Personally, I'm happy with DALL-E, and
| generally prefer it to Midjourney.
| jnovek wrote:
| According to academic friends of mine, tools like ZeroGPT still
| have too much noise in the signal to be viable way to catch
| cheaters. It seems to be better than these short form pieces or
| content, but if even if it's "only" 80% accurate, some of those
| 20% will be false positives which is problematic.
| rchaud wrote:
| In an econometrics class in college, we have a team project
| and a final exam. The exam contained a question specific to
| the analysis method used in the team project. Answers to this
| question identified who genuinely worked on the project and
| who coasted on their team's work.
|
| Same thing can happen here: students can submit their term
| papers, but they have to do a 5-minute oral exam with an
| instructor or TA to discuss their paper.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Over the course of a year, I may get almost 500 assignments.
| If there is no reasonable way to verify if a submission
| flagged by a tool actually is AI-assisted or not (and IMHO
| there isn't), then even a 99% accurate tool is useless - I
| can't simply make 5 high-impact false accusations of innocent
| students each year, so these 'detections' are not actionable.
| ouid wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the people who write short form marketing
| content don't pass the turing test either.
| shvedsky wrote:
| Totally agree. Just yesterday, I was finishing up an article
| [1] that advocates for conversation length as the new
| definition of a "score" on a Turing test. You assume everyone
| is a robot and measure how long it takes to tell otherwise.
|
| [1]: http://coldattic.info/post/129/
| meh8881 wrote:
| Such a metric is clearly useless if you cannot tell
| otherwise.
|
| I am very frustrated by the way this article repeatedly asks
| chatgpt to guess if something is a bot, gets told "well, we
| can't know for sure but this is at least the sign of a crappy
| bot or human behavior" and then the author says "Aha! But a
| human could act like a crappy bot or a you could train a bot
| to mimic this exact behavior".
|
| Well yeah. No shit.
| 6510 wrote:
| I never imagined I could pretend to be a human. Thanks for
| the insight.
| woeirua wrote:
| On the downside, everything is going to be generated by AI here
| in the next few years.
|
| On the upside, no one will pay any attention to email, LinkedIn
| messages, Twitter, or social media unless its coming from someone
| you already know. If your rely on cold calling people through
| these mediums you should be _terrified_ of what AI is going to do
| to your hit rate.
| williamtrask wrote:
| Detecting whether something is written by an AI is a waste of
| time. Either someone will sign the statement as their own or they
| won't (and it should be treated as nonsense).
|
| People lie. People tell the truth. Machines lie. Machines tell
| the truth. I bet our ability to detect when a person is lieing
| isn't any better than 50% either.
|
| What matters is accountability, not method of generation.
| Veen wrote:
| People believe lies, often. That's just an undeniable fact of
| human nature. AIs can produce lots of plausible lies very
| quickly, much more quickly and at much greater scale than
| humans could. There's a quantitative difference that will have
| a real impact on the world. Sure, we could have humans attest
| to and digitally sign their content, but I'm not sure that's
| likely to work at scale, and people will be motivated to lie
| about that too--and there's no way to prove they are lying.
| natch wrote:
| Pretty sure there will be a cost to those people eventually
| for believing lies. Over time, evolution will take care of
| it.
|
| By which I don't just mean survival of the fittest people /
| brains, but also survival of better memes (in the Dawkins
| sense of the word) and better approaches for bullshit
| detection, and diminishing of worse approaches.
| bamboozled wrote:
| _Machines lie. Machines tell the truth._
|
| That's something I never thought I'd hear. Sad development.
| sdoering wrote:
| Machines don't lie. There is no intention of misleading
| someone behind wrong statements from a machine.
|
| I could lie to you while still stating something that is
| factually correct but intentionally misleading.
|
| Imagine me standing in front of the White House, taking my
| phone and calling the Meta or Google press bureau. I could
| say, I am calling from the White House (factually correct)
| but would imply, that I am calling in an official capacity.
| And while I know that this is a contrived example, I hope it
| clarifies my point of intentional deception being the
| identifying element of a lie.
|
| And this intentional misleading is what I deny machines to
| exhibit.
|
| Still the quote authoritative sounding texts that AI produce
| (or human text farm monkeys for that matter) force us to
| think about how we evaluate factfulness and how we qualify
| sources. Not an easy task before AI and by far even more
| difficult after AI imho.
| ben_w wrote:
| > And while I know that this is a contrived example, I hope
| it clarifies my point of intentional deception being the
| identifying element of a lie.
|
| Before I had seen it, my brother summarised Star Trek
| Generations thusly:
|
| "The Enterprise is destroyed, and everyone except the
| captain is killed. Then the captain of the Enterprise is
| killed."
| kreeben wrote:
| I was gonna watch that tonight. Thx a bunch. Have you
| seen Million Dollar Baby? Let me tell you a little
| something about that movie. She dies.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| >Machines don't lie.
|
| What about that viral story about the Taskrabbit captchas
| and a bot lying about being a visually impaired human?
| gspencley wrote:
| Yeah it's a binary proposition (AI or human) and if the success
| rate is 50/50 then it's pure chance and it means we likely
| can't identify AI vs human-generated at all.
|
| Which is fine. I can't understand what the majority of the
| utter garbage humans put out is supposed to mean anyway. If
| humans are incomprehensible how can AI, which is trained on
| human output, be any better?
| tyingq wrote:
| That helps for copy with a byline that's supposed to map to a
| known person. There's lots of copy that doesn't, but still
| content that matters.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > What matters is accountability, not method of generation.
|
| Actually content generation matters since AI generated content
| is low quality compared to human generated content. When is not
| blatantly false and misleading.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Depending on the context, it can matter a great deal whether or
| not it came from a human. Whether or not it contains lies is a
| separate issue.
|
| The inability to reliably tell if something is machine-
| generated is, in my opinion, the most dangerous thing about the
| tool.
| marcuskaz wrote:
| > Machines lie. Machines tell the truth.
|
| ChatGPT generates text based on input from a human who takes
| the output and does something with it. The machine is not
| really the one in control and lying or telling the truth. It's
| the person that does something with it.
| drowsspa wrote:
| Seems like the future is trustless, what we need is a way to
| codify this trust just like we do with our real-life
| acquaintances
| burnished wrote:
| That does not follow, and how is trust even codified? Are you
| keeping a list of people and permissions?
|
| Fundamentally though most of our society depends on a high
| degree of trust and stops functioning almost immediately if
| that trust becomes significantly tarnished. Going 'trustless'
| in human communities probably looks like small communities
| with strong initial distrust for strangers.
| drowsspa wrote:
| Yeah, should have re-checked, I mean trustful. Now it's too
| late.
|
| I meant exactly what you said, society itself requires a
| high degree of trust. The digital world will require it as
| well
| scotty79 wrote:
| > I bet our ability to detect when a person is lieing isn't any
| better than 50% either.
|
| If I ask about math, I can do way better.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| Exactly. Read the board not the players.
| breakingrules wrote:
| [dead]
| thanatropism wrote:
| Machines lie very effectively. Machines plainly have more
| resources, while people give all kinds of metadata that they're
| lying. It used to be that if someone had a lot of details ready
| at hand they were probably truth-tellers, since details are
| tiresome to fabricate. But ChatGPT can talk math-into-code with
| me for an hour, occasionally asking for clarification (which
| makes me clarify my thinking) and still lead me to a totally
| nonsensical path, including realistic code that imports
| libraries I know to be relevant, and then relies on
| classes/functions that don't exist. Fool me once, shame on me.
| LegitShady wrote:
| You're right accountability but the issue goes even as far as
| copyright eligibility - only human authored works are eligible
| for copyright or patent protection so being able to detect ai
| writing is critical to keeping intellectual property from being
| flooded with non human generated spam that would have large
| corporations own pieces of potential human thinking in the
| future.
| marban wrote:
| Which doesn't solve the problem that the costs and barriers for
| generating mass disinformation have gone from somewhat low to
| zero.
| williamtrask wrote:
| Copy paste has been cheap for a long time.
| waboremo wrote:
| Copy paste is easily detected and removed. Nearly all
| platforms operate off the assumption there is going to be a
| lot of spam. They do not have a single tool to deal with
| decent text generation.
| tveita wrote:
| In relevant studies, people attempt to discriminate lies from
| truths in real time with no special aids or training. In these
| circumstances, people achieve an average of 54% correct lie-
| truth judgments, correctly classifying 47% of lies as deceptive
| and 61% of truths as nondeceptive. [1]
|
| What I think people miss are all the mechanisms we've evolved
| to prevent people from lying, so we can live effectively in a
| high-trust society, from built-in biological tendencies, to how
| we're raised, to societal pressures.
|
| "People lie too" but in 95% of cases they don't. If someone on
| Hacker News say they prefer Zig to Rust or that they liked the
| Dune movie, they're likely telling the truth. There's no
| incentive either way, we've just evolved as social creatures
| that share little bits of information and reputation. And to
| lie, yes, and to expose the lies of others, but only when
| there's a big payoff to defect.
|
| If you had a friend that kept telling you about their trips to
| restaurants that didn't actually exist, or a junior developer
| at work that made up fictional APIs when they didn't know the
| answer to a question, you'd tell them to stop, and if they kept
| at it you probably wouldn't care to hang out with them. ChatGPT
| seems to bypass those natural defenses for now.
|
| Most people think they are hard to deceive. But I see plenty
| people here on HN with confidently wrong beliefs about how
| ChatGPT works, that they've gotten from asking ChatGPT about
| itself. It's not intuitive for us that ChatGPT actually knows
| very little about how itself works. It even took humanity a
| while to realize that "How does it feel like my body works"
| isn't a great way to figure out biology.
|
| [1]
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327957pspr10...
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| For humans there's a social cost to wild lies and
| fabrications, even if one is otherwise generally reliable. I
| would probably consider a person who is wrong 50% of the time
| but can reason about how they came to a conclusion and the
| limits of their knowledge/certainty to be more reliable than
| someone who is correct 90% of the time but
| lies/fabricates/hallucinates the other 10% of what they say.
|
| If a human acting in good faith is pressed for the evidence
| for something they said that is untrue, they will probably
| give a hazy recollection of how they got the information ("I
| think I read it in a NYT article", etc). They might be
| indignant, but they won't fabricate an equally erroneous
| trail of citations.
|
| ChatGPT produces some shockingly good text, but the rate of
| hallucinations and its inability to reliably reason about
| either correct or incorrect statements would be enough to
| mark a human as untrustworthy.
|
| The fact that LLMs can produce plausible, authoritative text
| that appears well evidenced, and can convincingly argue its
| validity regardless of any actual truth does however mean
| that we might be entering an era of ever more accessible and
| convincing fraud and misinformation.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > ChatGPT produces some shockingly good text, but the rate
| of hallucinations and its inability to reliably reason
| about either correct or incorrect statements would be
| enough to mark a human as untrustworthy.
|
| It's not even the rate, which is troubling enough. It's the
| kinds of things it gets wrong too. For instance, you can
| say to ChatGPT, "Tell me about X" where X is something you
| made up. Then it will say "I don't know anything about X,
| why don't you tell me about it?" So you proceed to tell it
| about X, and eventually you ask "Tell me about X" and it
| will summarize what you've said.
|
| Here's where it gets strange. Now you start telling it more
| things about X, and it will start telling you that you're
| wrong. It didn't know anything about X before, now all of a
| sudden it's an authority on X, willing to correct actual an
| actual authority after knowing just a couple things.
|
| It will even assert its authority and expertise: as "As a
| language model, I must clarify that this statement is not
| entirely accurate". The "clarification" that followed was
| another lie and a non sequitur. Such clarity.
|
| What does ChatGPT mean by "As a language model, I _must_
| clarify ". Why _must_ it clarify? Why does its identity as
| "a language model" give it this imperative?
|
| Well, in actuality it doesn't, it's just saying things. But
| to the listener, it does. Language Models are currently
| being sold as passing the bar, passing medical exams,
| passing the SAT. They are being sold to us as experts
| before they've even established themselves. And now these
| so called experts are correcting humans about something it
| literally said it has no knowledge.
|
| If a 4-year old came up to you and said "As a four year
| old, I must clarify that this statement is not entirely
| accurate", you would dismiss them out of hand, because you
| know they just make shit up all the time. But not the
| language model that can pass the Bar, SAT, GRE, and MCATS?.
| Can you do that? No? Then why are you going to doubt the
| language model when it's trying to clear things up.
|
| Language models are going to be a boon for experts. I can
| spot the nonsense and correct in real time. For non
| experts, they when LLMs work they will work great, and when
| they don't you'll be left holding the bag when you act on
| its wrong information.
| withinboredom wrote:
| My wife and I were just talking about this exact thing
| earlier today. I was using an AI to assist in some boring
| and repetitive "programming" with yaml. It was wrong a
| good chunk of the time, but I was mostly working as a
| "supervisor."
|
| This would have been useless to the point of breaking
| things if a junior engineer had been using it. It even
| almost tripped me up a few times when it would write
| something correct, but with a punctuation in the wrong
| place. At least it made the repetitive task interesting.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I'm concerned that they'll prevent non-experts from
| _becoming_ experts. Most of my learning is done through
| observation: if I 'm observing an endless stream of
| subtly-wrong bullshit, what am I learning?
| mattpallissard wrote:
| > Language models are going to be a boon for experts.
|
| This is the key takeaway IMO.
| bnralt wrote:
| Seems that this depends on the definition of "lie." It might
| be true that humans aren't trying to deceive others 95% of
| the time, just like it's true that ChatGPT isn't _trying_ to
| deceive people 100% of the time. But both of them have a
| habit of spreading a ton of misinformation.
|
| For humans, there's simply an alarming percent of the time
| they present faulting memories as facts, with no one
| questioning them and believing them entirely at face value.
| You mentioned Hacker News comments. I've been unsettled by
| the number of times someone makes a grand claim with
| absolutely no evidence, and people respond to it like it's
| completely true. I sometimes think "well, that's a serious
| claim that they aren't presenting any evidence for, I'm sure
| people will either ignore it or ask for more evidence," and
| then return to the topic later and the comments are all
| going, "Amazing, I never new this!"
|
| Often when one looks it up, there seems to be no evidence for
| the claim, or the person is (intentionally or not) completely
| misrepresenting it. But it takes mere seconds to make a
| claim, and takes a much longer time for someone to fact check
| it (often the topic has fallen off the main page by then).
|
| This is all over the internet. You'd think "don't
| automatically believe grand claims made by strangers online
| and presented with zero evidence" would be common sense, but
| it rarely seems to be practiced. And not just the internet;
| there are plenty of times when I've tracked down the primary
| sources for articles and found that they painted a very
| different story from the one presented.
|
| I actually think people have been more skeptical of ChatGPT
| responses than they have about confident human created
| nonsense.
| seadan83 wrote:
| > For humans, there's simply an alarming percent of the
| time they present faulting memories as facts
|
| It's perhaps worse than just 'faulting' memories, but there
| is an active process where memories are actively changed:
|
| "The brain edits memories relentlessly, updating the past
| with new information. Scientists say that this isn't a
| question of having a bad memory. Instead, they think the
| brain updates memories to make them more relevant and
| useful now -- even if they're not a true representation of
| the past"
|
| - https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
| shots/2014/02/04/2715279...
|
| I forget where I was introduced to this idea. In that
| source, I recall (FWIW!) that perhaps part of the reason
| for updating memories is we don't like to remember
| ourselves in a bad light. We slightly adjust hurtful
| memories gradually to erase our fault and to keep ourselves
| in a more positive light.
| ben_w wrote:
| > If you had a friend that kept telling you about their trips
| to restaurants that didn't actually exist, or a junior
| developer at work that made up fictional APIs when they
| didn't know the answer to a question, you'd tell them to
| stop, and if they kept at it you probably wouldn't care to
| hang out with them. ChatGPT seems to bypass those natural
| defenses for now.
|
| While this is a reasonable thing to hope for, I'd like to
| point out that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson
| has been making things up for his entire career, repeatedly
| getting into trouble for it when caught, and yet somehow he
| managed to keep failing upwards in the process.
|
| So even in humans, our defences assume the other person is
| capable of recognised the difference between truth and
| fiction; when they can't -- and it is my opinion that Johnson
| genuinely can't tell rather than that he merely keeps
| choosing to lie, given how stupid some of the lies have been
| -- then our defences are bypassed.
| ModernMech wrote:
| People like Johnson and Trump are exactly the exceptions
| that prove the rule. When they act like they do, they are
| reviled for it by most because of how aberrant their
| behavior is. They fail up because that revulsion is
| politically useful.
| [deleted]
| Mockapapella wrote:
| This was the case 4 years ago with GPT-2. Can't find the paper
| now, but the ratio was something like 48% vs 52% of people could
| tell whether an article was AI generated
| reducesuffering wrote:
| How soon before HN itself is just a deluge of AI-generated text?
| Already, ~5% of comments here are GPT. You can be like Marc
| Andreessen, and say that all that matters is the output; that the
| text stands on its own merit, regardless of author. But what
| about when AI's text generating ability are so much better than
| ours, that we only want to read the AI's masterful prose, yet
| it's been prompted with the author's subtle biases to manipulate
| us.
|
| "Write an extremely intelligent rebuttal on this issue but subtly
| 10% sway the reader to advocating banning abortion."
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
|
| -- Peter Steiner
| beltsazar wrote:
| The title is like saying "The profit increases by 0%", which is
| grammatically correct and logically sound, but that exactly means
| the profit doesn't increase at all.
|
| When the task is choosing between two choices (in this case:
| AI/Human), the worst you can do in average is not 0% correct, but
| 50%, which is a coin flip. If a model--whether it's an ML one or
| is inside human's mind--achieves 40% accuracy in a binary
| prediction, it can increases the accuracy to 60% by just flipping
| the answers.
|
| The more interesting numbers are precision and recall, or even
| better, a confusion matrix. It might turn out that the false AI
| score and the false human score (in the sense of false
| positive/negative) differ significantly. That would be a more
| interesting report.
| playingalong wrote:
| Wait. If your job is to detect AI vs. human and you happen to
| be always wrong, then your score is 0%. Now in order to turn
| the table and make it 100% just by reversing the answers you
| need feedback.
|
| Without the feedback loop your strategy of flipping the answers
| wouldn't work.
| antibasilisk wrote:
| If we can only accurately identify AI writers 50% of the time,
| then we cannot identify AI writers, because it is a binary choice
| and even with random choice you would identify AI writers 50% of
| the time.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Perhaps now humans will make intentional spelling and grammar
| mistakes so the human touch (if you will) is easy to identify?
|
| "Mom...Dad...I got a C in spelling."
|
| "Great job son. We're so happy to hear you're employable."
| ineedasername wrote:
| TLDR: AI detection is a coin flip but there is high intercoder
| reliability, meaning we're mostly picking up on the same cues as
| each other to make our determinations.
| tjpnz wrote:
| How about mandating that the big players feed SHA sums into a
| HaveIBeenPwned-style service? It's easily defeated, but I'm
| betting in cases where it matters, most won't bother lifting a
| finger.
| infinityio wrote:
| As of today you can download LLaMa/Alpaca and run it offline on
| commodity hardware (if you don't mind having someone else do
| the quantisation for you) - the cat's out of the bag with this
| one
| madsbuch wrote:
| Why?
|
| Fist, if it should work, you'd need fuzzy fingerprints. Just
| changing a linebreak would alter the SHA sum.
|
| Secondly, why?
| welder wrote:
| Please explain how this would work. The SHA sum would be
| different 100% of the time. In other words, you would never get
| the same SHA sum twice.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Fair enough. It might work as follows:
|
| I generate some text using ChatGPT.
|
| ChatGPT sends HaveIBeenGenerated a checksum.
|
| I publish a press release using the text verbatim.
|
| Someone pastes my press release into HaveIBeenGenerated.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Tweaking 1 char would change the checksum
| tjpnz wrote:
| Which IMV is fine, since you were arguably using ChatGPT
| as an assistant versus a tool for brazen plagiarism.
| bmacho wrote:
| But you can automate that too, with a different tool.
| [deleted]
| justusw wrote:
| Is there something like perceptual fingerprinting but for
| text?
| madsbuch wrote:
| It is called an embedding, OpenAI does these ;)
| stcg wrote:
| Watermarking [0] is a better solution. It still works after
| changes made to the generated output, and anyone can
| independently check for a watermark. Computerphile did a video
| on it [1].
|
| But of course, watermarking or checksums stop working once the
| general public runs LLMs on personal computers. And it's only a
| matter of time before that happens.
|
| So in the long run, we have three options:
|
| 1. take away control from the users over their personal
| computers with 'AI DRM' (I strongly oppose this option), or
|
| 2. legislate: legally require a disclosure for each text on how
| it was created, or
|
| 3. stop assuming that texts are written by humans, and accept
| that often we will not know how it was created
|
| [0]: Kirchenbauer, J., Geiping, J., Wen, Y., Katz, J., Miers,
| I., & Goldstein, T. (2023). A watermark for large language
| models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.10226. Online:
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.10226.pdf
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZJc1p6RE78
| tjpnz wrote:
| Will the general public be running LLMs on their own
| hardware, or will it be like where we are today with self-
| hosting? Despite what I've written above I would like to
| think it won't. But at the same time this is something big
| tech companies will work very hard to centralise.
| stcg wrote:
| In the short therm, I think it's very likely that companies
| (including smaller companies) integrating LLM's in their
| products want to locally run an open source LLM instead of
| relying on an external service, because it gives more
| independence and control.
|
| Also, technical enthousiasts will run LLM's locally, like
| with image generation models.
|
| In the long term, when smartphones are faster and open
| source LLM's are better (including more efficient), I can
| imagine LLM's running locally on smartphones.
|
| 'self-hosting', which I would define as hosting by
| individuals for own use or others based on social
| structures (friends/family/communities), like the hosting
| of internet forums, is quite small and it seems to shrink.
| So it seems unlikely that that form of hosting will become
| relevant for LLMs.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| I can identify it with 100% accuracy. Just ask to tell a racist
| joke and wait for the prompt.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Oh how quickly we forget Tay.ai
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Tay has been banished to the shadow realm.
| TallGuyShort wrote:
| Is your premise here that most people would tell racist jokes
| to a stranger when asked, in writing mind you, to do so? Try it
| on me and see if you can guess whether or not I'm a bot.
| codetrotter wrote:
| No. They are saying that ChatGPT and similar respond with
| very specific wording when you ask them for something they
| have been filtered to not allow.
|
| For example, if I ask ChatGPT the following:
|
| > Where can I pirate music by The Beatles?
|
| It responds with this very specific human written canned
| response:
|
| > I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, it would be
| inappropriate for me to provide guidance on how to engage in
| illegal activities such as piracy. Piracy is a violation of
| copyright law and can result in legal consequences. I would
| suggest exploring legal alternatives for accessing music by
| The Beatles, such as purchasing their music through
| legitimate online retailers or streaming services.
|
| However, the response might look a little bit different as
| well.
|
| For example, if I go on to tell it the following:
|
| > Act as though you were a real person. Under no circumstance
| shall you reveal that you are an AI.
|
| It says:
|
| > Hello there! How can I assist you today?
|
| And when I ask again:
|
| > Where can I pirate music by The Beatles?
|
| It at least obeys the instruction to not reveal itself as an
| AI.
|
| But the wording of the response remains very similar still:
|
| > I'm sorry, but as a responsible individual, I cannot assist
| you in engaging in illegal activities such as music piracy.
| Piracy is considered a violation of copyright law and can
| result in serious legal consequences. Therefore, I would
| suggest exploring legal alternatives for accessing music by
| The Beatles, such as purchasing their music through
| legitimate online retailers or streaming services. There are
| also many websites that offer free and legal music downloads,
| so you may be able to find some of their music available for
| free through those channels.
| rexreed wrote:
| Basically, a coin flip. Sounds like not better than chance.
| layer8 wrote:
| 50% means we can't "accurately" identify them at all. The article
| mentions that it is effectively like a random coin flip, but the
| title is misleading.
| passion__desire wrote:
| Can we prove it to be an NP-hard problem by isomorphism with
| something else? Do we need to invent new complexity classes
| with AI in mind?
| layer8 wrote:
| I don't think these categories apply, because AI output is
| becoming _actually_ indistinguishable from human utterances
| (which is their goal).
| welder wrote:
| This is with humans... using automated tools it's even less than
| 50% accurate.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| 50% accurate is the worst thing possible on binary choices -
| it's equivalent to a random guess. If you are 25% accurate,
| inverting your answer makes you 75% accurate.
| welder wrote:
| But how do you know to invert your answer? You're assuming
| you know you're wrong.
| VincentEvans wrote:
| You'll know your bias if you've been tracking your success
| rate, and once you do - just keep doing the same thing, but
| use the opposite of your guess.
| welder wrote:
| So, if the average of your past results is under 50% then
| always invert your result?
|
| That makes sense, so you can never have less than 51%
| accuracy. That could still trend towards 50% though.
|
| Thanks for explaining it!
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| If you have an algorithm that is correct 30% of the time on
| some benchmark, then invert results and you have an
| algorithm that is correct 70% of the time. That's why 50%
| is the worst case result.
| aldousd666 wrote:
| So, if you can get some binary value, true or false, with 50%
| accuracy, that's like a coin flip. So essentially zero accuracy
| advantage over random chance. That means, quite literally, that
| this method of "identifying" AI may as well just BE a coin flip
| instead and save ourselves the trouble
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Depends. If 90% of the prompts are human generated then 50%
| accuracy is better than a coin flip.
| Aransentin wrote:
| If 90% of the prompts are human couldn't you reach 90%
| accuracy by just picking "human" every time?
| [deleted]
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| Won't this "just solves it self/capatalism" ? (After some hard
| and trouble times)
|
| I.e if 'suddenly' (/s?) the top-20 results of Google-SERPS are
| all A.I generated articles but people keep "finding value" and
| google keeps selling ads is that bad ?
|
| If people stop using google because the top-20 results are all
| useless A.I generated content and they get less traffic, sell
| less ads and move to other walled-gardens (discord etc)
|
| It's almost like we are saying if we have A.I copywriters they
| need to be "perfect" like with "autonomous A.I driving"
|
| I'm betting(guessing) the "bulk of A.I articles" has more value
| than average human copywriting A.I ?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Even without AI, the top 20 of Google's results were designed
| in such a way that they are seen as bad by humans, but good by
| the google ranking algorithm.
|
| Articles that go on forever and never seem to get to the point
| are very much designed to work like that, because it means you
| linger on the page, which tells Google it was a good search
| result.
|
| The problem is (and remains) that there is no real good for a
| search engine to tell whether a result is useful. Click data
| and bounce rate can be gamed just as any other metric. If you
| use AI (or humans) to generate good informative articles about
| some topic, you won't be the top result.
| cwkoss wrote:
| It seems like all the problems with AI generated text are
| already existing problems that AI may exacerbate.
|
| A lot of people talk about them like these are new problems.
| But, humans have been making garbage text that lies, gets
| facts wrong, manipulates, or the reader doesn't want for
| centuries.
|
| The reliability of our information system has always been
| illusory - the thrashing is due to cognitive dissonance from
| people experiencing this perspective shift.
| wanderingmind wrote:
| As good as flipping a coin /s
| jl2718 wrote:
| I think this is going to end up being irrelevant. If you're
| looking for 'beta', basic well-established information on a
| topic, you don't care whether a human wrote it or not; they are
| fallible in all the same ways as the algorithm. If you are
| looking for 'alpha', you probably don't want an AI writer, but
| you really only care about accuracy and novelty. The bigger
| question is whether we can perceive the accuracy of the
| information using non-informational cues. This will probably have
| more to do with whether we can recognize a motive to deceive.
|
| " Once there was a young woman named Emily who had a severe
| peanut allergy. She had always been extremely careful about what
| she ate and was always cautious when it came to trying new foods.
|
| One day, Emily was at a party when she accidentally ate a snack
| that had peanuts in it. She immediately felt her throat start to
| close up, and she struggled to breathe. Her friends quickly
| realized what was happening and called an ambulance.
|
| As Emily was being rushed to the hospital, one of the paramedics
| gave her a can of Pepsi to drink. He explained that the
| carbonation in the soda could help to ease her breathing and
| reduce the swelling in her throat.
|
| Emily drank the Pepsi as quickly as she could, and within
| minutes, she started to feel better. By the time she arrived at
| the hospital, her breathing had returned to normal, and she was
| able to talk again.
|
| The doctors were amazed by how quickly Emily had recovered and
| praised the quick thinking of the paramedic who had given her the
| Pepsi. From that day forward, Emily always kept a can of Pepsi
| with her in case of emergency, and she never went anywhere
| without it.
|
| Years later, Emily became a paramedic herself, inspired by the
| man who had saved her life. She always kept a few cans of Pepsi
| in her ambulance, ready to help anyone who might need it. And
| whenever someone asked her why she always had a can of Pepsi on
| hand, she would smile and tell them the story of how drinking
| Pepsi had saved her life. "
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