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Why do we all fall for AI-generated language?
- matkoniecz 4y agoMaybe it would be interesting to read if presented as an article, but the Twitter thread is unreadable.
- hourago 4y agoI totally agree. I understand that people do not blog anymore. But Twitter is not a good place for lengthy texts, by design!
- pharrington 4y agoTheir preprint is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07271 https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07271
- legrande 4y agohttps://nitter.net/maurice_jks/status/1537814372462039043 https://nitter.net/maurice_jks/status/1537814372462039043
- matkoniecz 4y agooh, that is much better - I survived long enough to notice link to their paper. Thanks!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tuatoru 4y ago> the Twitter thread is unreadable But not in a way that makes it seem likely that it was produced by an AI. Was it? - that's the real question here.
- hourago 4y agoReal people does not always speak good. And everybody has blinds pots, topics that are interesting but that we have little knowledge. > We show that human judgments of AI-generated language are handicapped by intuitive but flawed heuristics such as associating first-person pronouns, authentic words, or family topics with humanity. And that is a good one. Because we try to understand the others when they does not make fully sense.
- midjji 4y agoBecause its not responsive/dialogue.
- krisoft 4y agoIt is such a weird question. People fall for AI-generated language because the goal of the people who made the generator was to create language like a human would. Do people wonder why scissors cut paper? Because that is what they were made for! If the AI wouldn't fool the humans the researchers would be honing it more. Same way if we couldn't make paper cutting scissors there would be people trying to make one. Am I missing the point here?
- maurice__ 4y agoInteresting angle! We're showing that people fall for generated language not necessarily because generated language is all that good, but because people are looking for the wrong cues and are thus bad at identifying generated language. Back to the scissors, it would be like someone trying to tell you that their scissors cut marvelously, but you ask yourself whether the paper they are demonstrating them on is strong enough to prove that. Making something for cutting doesn't guarantee that it will cut and doesn't explain why. I even suspect that in the early days of scissors it was all that clear why they worked. Similarly, we don't understand much about GPT-3. It was trained to predict the next token in a sequence, not to create an illusion of personhood. But somehow it does so, and we're trying to understand how and why.
- readams 4y agoI think you're missing the point. The question could be possibly rephrased as "what are the tricks that the AI uses to fool humans?" The paper goes on to identify some of the specific tricks that the AIs appear to use. A related question might be "why are we fooled by such simple tricks?"
- dustingetz 4y agowhy do we assume that humans are smart? answer: ego; corollary: we are not
- MathYouF 4y agoWe seem obviously to be the smartest living things in the universe we know of. We're also approximately the dumbest possible things that could construct the society and technology we have (if we weren't, we would've done it sooner). I agree that some humility of our own intellect as primates would do us a lot of good in the coming age of AI.
- legrande 4y agoWe fall for it because although language is a powerful tool, it's incredibly bad at conveying nuance, context, and describing phenomenons present in nature. Poetry comes close, but still doesn't hit the spot, and leaves out so much detail, no matter how well written or verbose in its descriptions. Our own mind has to fill in the blanks of a well written description. Language also can't express the ineffable or the divine. It can hint at it, but it won't transmit the phenomenon correctly into another mind.
- maurice__ 4y agoThere's some nice work on people's ability to detect generated poetry (GPT-2 tho): https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.09980 https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.09980
- trqwerty 4y agoMost of these AI vs. human tests take very poor or weird looking human creations vs. the best AI creations. No wonder that one gets the desired results.
- secondcoming 4y agoIs it the case for all languages, or just English? Native English speakers are typically used to interacting with people whose native language isn’t English and so easily tolerate errors or odd word choice.
- maurice__ 4y agoWe ran the study with US-based participants rating English-language generated profiles only. I believe the findings would generalize to other cultures though: We found people associate certain language features such as first-person speech, family topics, speaking about past events, with humanity. These false intuitions may have developed in interpersonal interactions or sci-fi movies, and it's unlikely that e.g. a French speaker would have acquired "better" intuitions. With regards to grammar, people were more likely to rate text with grammatical issues as generated. However, turns out that heuristics didn't work either, as self-presentations written by people had more grammatical issues than those generated by GPT-3. That being said, the strongest generative models to date are primarily trained on English data and models in other languages don't quite perform as well yet.
- FatalLogic 4y agoBceuase we asmsume poeple are tyring to mkae snense
- nonrandomstring 4y agoI had to mark about 100 end of term essays written by Indian students for a British university. My unwritten instructions are not to take language into account much. I must attend mainly to the technical content. At least half were written in what I took to be an authentic voice but with such bad grammar and spelling as to render them barely readable. Some had clearly been mangled in a laundromat of Google translate from Hinglish via Mongolian and Swahili. They contained bizarre phrases and comical statements. Many more were obviously written by some kind of generator and fudged until they read well enough. Since the student handbook states the threshold for academic "plagiarism" is above 20 percent perhaps unsurprisingly the Turnitin (an awful tool) score for almost every essays was just below 20 percent. An interesting clustering! Students who cheat have a formidable array of tools now, not just GPT but automatic re-writers and scripts to test against Turnitin until it passes. Add to this problem that my time for marking is not paid extra, is squeezed tighter every semester, and that students are given endless concessions to boost their "experience". The handbook also says that if they fail, no worries, they get to try again, and again, and again... and I am sure if I actually stuck to my guns and failed every single student I'd be fired. As I wrote in the Times last year, I think the technological arms race against GPT (and the economic conditions that mean it's used) cannot be won with the time and resources available to ordinary human teachers.
- User23 4y ago> As I wrote in the Times last year, I think the technological arms race against GPT (and the economic conditions that mean it's used) cannot be won with the time and resources available to ordinary human teachers Based on the rest of your post, there appears to be a stronger case that your students are setting a rather low bar for GPT to stumble over. It's unfortunate that there are so many cultures where widespread cheating is condoned, if not outright encouraged. They may be able to fool their teachers, but how much comfort will that be when the bridges are collapsing, the pipelines are exploding, the wind turbines are breaking apart, and all the other activities that ultimately report to reality and not some human superior who can be bluffed become impossible to continue?
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
- User23 4y agoHumans have a powerful tendency to ascribe human characteristics to inanimate objects, including computers. It's a kind of variant of the Pathetic Fallacy[1], except for artifacts instead of natural objects. The intelligence of an artificial intelligence is as real as the characters in our dreams. It's a construct of our own consciousnesses. That doesn't mean it should be discounted though. Our consciousnesses can do a lot and finding artificial ways to stimulate them is powerful to say the least. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy
- winnit 4y agoAgreed. William Burroughs conducted cut-up experiments in the 20th century, where he would take disparate texts and splice them together. The surprising result was how often they recombined into new meanings. One of his motivations was to stimulate his creativity through accidental quasi-random inputs. I am content with seeing reading in a similar light; texts carefully written but carelessly read - like in abstract art, we are usually happy to let the text recombine in ways which say more about ourselves!
- schroeding 4y agoFrom the pre-print paper[1]: > ... we believe the next generation of language models must be designed not to undermine human intuition Right, but isn't a major reason why we build these huge language models to replace actual humans in e.g. Level 1 support with chatbots? Almost all chatbots I used in the past (and most were not even ML based, someone programmed this in) were weirdly personal and tried to be non-robotic, with jokes and human-like reactions to inputs like "Thanks!". Taking a look at some projects that used GPT-3[2], many try to imitate humans. For some, like Replika.ai, the whole "being human" thing is their entire schtick. There is obviously a market for text completion AIs that imitate humans, so it's doubtful that we'll get this toothpaste back into the tube, IMO. [1] https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2206/2206.07271.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2206/2206.07271.pdf [2] https://medium.com/letavc/apps-and-startups-powered-by-gpt-3-976c55dbc737 https://medium.com/letavc/apps-and-startups-powered-by-gpt-3... (caution, 2020)
- tlhunter 4y agoI wonder if this spells out the downfall of social media? Or at least non-verified users on social media? As time goes on we'll have larger and larger armies of bots spewing automated political rhetoric everywhere.
- dane-pgp 4y agoIs automated political rhetoric any worse than the human-generated kind? Do you think that there is a limited supply of propaganda out there, which is a bottleneck to how quickly people can be radicalised?
- ineedasername 4y agoLot's of people don't write all that well. A little disorganized, awkward phrasing, run on sentences. If AI does a better job than even 10% of the population then of course there's going to be a sizeable amount of miscategorizing when asking humans to classify writing as computer or human generated. You could probably use a corpus of purely human writing and have people attribute a decent portion to computer generated. Asking why AI writing can fool humans is a bit like asking why a computer is better at many tasks often performed by humans.
- fristechill 4y agoThe reason why some/many people are bad at writing is because they haven't yet discovered anything interesting to say. Therefore they weren't motivated to improve. This is the criterion: is it interesting? 'Yes' means it's not AI-generated. 'No' means it's not worth reading.
- ineedasername 4y agoNo, lack of interest in a topic does not, by itself, cause awkward phrasing, run on sentences, poor structuring of the logical flow of sentences within a paragraph and paragraphs within the larger structure, repetitive language, repetitive language, repetitive language, outright incorrect word choice, overuse of the passive voice, ambiguous references... I could go on.
- fristechill 4y agoSustained interest in a topic solves the problems associated with how to express ideas about it. There's a co-evolution between developing an ability and having a motivation for doing so. The flaws in writing you've mentioned are valid, but in the right hands they've all been used as rhetorical devices at some time or another.
- ineedasername 4y agoSustained interest does not solve issues of understanding how to properly structure paragraphs and larger portions of writing. It's not going to cause someone to follow Strunk & White's style suggestions when the person could not do so otherwise. I don't see how it could solve many other things I mentioned. I have first hand experience reading such work: 10% is outright bad, 20% merely poor, 50% okay but with some of the problems I mentioned, 15% good, 5% very good to excellent. (Rough approximations.) Further, writers in the okay -> excellent range can frequently perform at their same level on new topics or writing prompts. Interest is at best a minor factor. Separately, the ability for skilled writers to employ problematic methids I mentioned deliberately and to good effect is not relevant to my original comment. I am not talking about excellent writers who can write fantastic work while subverting traditional writing style and the soft rules of grammar. I'm think that sort of writer would be correctly identified as human at least a little more often than others. I am specifically talking about the large number of people who can't do this. Interest simply cannot overcome lack of basic knowledge on how write properly. No more than a strong interest in chemistry will overcome lack of engineering experience when building infrastructure for large scale chemical transport. Writing is a separate skill from knowledge on the topic about which the writer is writing. Chemical engineering is a separate skill from knowledge about chemistry itself. Strong interest can only take a person so far when it intersects with an endeavor that requires unrelated skills. Interest may elevate someone's writing from okay or good to better but it cannot replace skills the writer doesn't have.
- akagusu 4y agoMy question is when government will obligate companies to identify and label AI generated content so people can distinguish it from human generated content?
- dane-pgp 4y agoI'd guess "by the start of 2023": https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-61817647 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-61817647
- andyjohnson0 4y agoBecause secretly we know that our own consciousness is just a model watching its own outputs too.
- ummonk 4y agoThis is why it's important that the Turing test is adversarial and done with a human control. I see way too many people (even some smart engineers) reading AI-generated writing that looks human and declaring that the AI passed the Turing test.
- derbOac 4y agoThe true functional variant of the Turing test isn't whether a human can guess whether it's human, but rather, whether the AI is indistinguishable from humans in A/B RCTs with regard to satisfaction, etc. That is, do customers complain more with AI?
- jokethrowaway 4y agoI think I'll start running my copy through gpt3 to make it more human
- mproud 4y agoA tweet no doubt generated by an AI.
- wruza 4y agoMaybe for the same reason as “this insta doesn’t exist” looks better than your reflection in the morning. Don’t we fall for too many things to be surprised here specifically?
- LeoPanthera 4y agoHow much of this is because English is particularly tolerant of "mistakes"? It is a poorly specified language and so tolerates a lot of variation. How good is AI generated text in other languages?
- fjert 4y agoI had a similar thought. Plus, if you're reading the text on the internet you might just assume something written weird or poorly is written by somebody whose first language isn't English.
- HKH2 4y agoHow is it poorly specified?
- Tomis02 4y ago> AI systems produce smart replies, autocompletes, and translations Replace "produce" with "guess". That's what current AI does, it makes a guess without any reasoning capabilities. Google Translate is atrocious for even simple sentences.
- HKH2 4y agoPeople are used to writing inoffensive fluff because more words means more money. I hope AI gets used a lot more, because it might actually push people to write concisely and take more risks.
- ArrayBoundCheck 4y agoTwo things. First, I seen text generated by GPT-3, it's not hard to tell it's been generated. Typically the the text is short and could fool someone because it may have been uttered by an actual person (such as a 5 word sentence) or not short and becomes more obvious by the word Second what is "Optimized for humanity"? If people are hand picking the text then sure you might be able to by chance get a dozen good sentences to put next to a dozen bad sentences from humans. But at that point maybe noone would bother to read it. People barely read past the title anyway
- navjack27 4y ago"we all" I never have
- _the_inflator 4y agoThere is huge potential if you abstract a little, like in the transmitter - receiver model. In short: AI has no ego and does not care about self-expression and telling "my story". It gives people, what people want. Put another way: AI's style his highly flexible, while human authors struggle even with slightest of critic. I can relate. ;) Also consider the average human being not having an IQ of 130+ (even though 80% thinks otherwise ;)). We all live in a bubble and at least AI does not care, if you use highly academic phrasing ("Because I studied hard, I use these words!" or not. If you consider A/B testing and real-time feedback, you can image some sort of translator with sliders for "Which audience do you want to address?" Every note then becomes designed. This has some potential. We all love R. Feynman for his metaphors, that explain complicated topics. This might work also in the other direction, accessibility: Insert Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus - and voila, even a 15 year old finally can understand the book.
- barrysteve 4y agoSame reason we fall for AI-generated artworks and AI-generated voices. The presentation is sometimes immaculate to the expert, even more difficult for the untrained eye. It is much easier to fall for any given piece of media or writing when the meaning is pre-established and non-interactive. A dating profile already has many many narratives and language uses filtered out that a machine doesn't convincingly filter out on it's own. I can't reliably determine reposts of old social media content by karma farming bot accounts, which is a more basic version of the same concept. It's not too surprising I would fall for GPT trained, copy & pasting of dating profile text.