16 ms·

Research shows we can only accurately identify AI writers about 50% of the time

apienx 4y ago
Sample size is 4,600 participants (over 6 experiments). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208839120 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208839120
wslh 4y ago
50%? Like flipping a coin? or flipping a coin is 25% if we think the identification of this 50% is 100% accurate.
zirgs 4y ago
If that text contains something that causes ChatGPT to respond with "As a language model..." then it's most likely written by a human.
lvl102 4y ago
We need to embrace AI with open arms.
- rvba 4y ago
  I, for one, welcome our AI overlords https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8lcUHQYhPTE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8lcUHQYhPTE
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Why is that?
inciampati 4y ago
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?
- janekm 4y ago
  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...)
  - georgyo 4y ago
    South Park just did an episode with exactly this premise.
    - tudorw 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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.
        asdff 4y ago
        "What are the latest words in use, human?" "I uhh I am not.." "Those words are already in my training set. What are the latest words in use, human? Compliance guarantees survival"
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    While filtering out badspeak.
- vbezhenar 4y ago
  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.
tjpnz 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  Why? Fist, if it should work, you'd need fuzzy fingerprints. Just changing a linebreak would alter the SHA sum. Secondly, why?
- welder 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - nonethewiser 4y ago
      Tweaking 1 char would change the checksum
      - tjpnz 4y ago
welder 4y ago
This is with humans... using automated tools it's even less than 50% accurate.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    But how do you know to invert your answer? You're assuming you know you're wrong.
    - sebzim4500 4y ago
      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.
    - VincentEvans 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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!
aldousd666 4y ago
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
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  Depends. If 90% of the prompts are human generated then 50% accuracy is better than a coin flip.
  - Aransentin 4y ago
    If 90% of the prompts are human couldn't you reach 90% accuracy by just picking "human" every time?
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
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.
- Veen 4y ago
  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 https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11156
  - callahad 4y ago
    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.
    - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
      Welcome to the doom camp :)
- macNchz 4y ago
  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.
not_enoch_wise 4y ago
Racism: the only way to trust text content as genuinely human
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  For an extremely brief period that's already coming to an end. Unfettered GPT-alike models are already available.
- rchaud 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
Neuro_Gear 4y ago
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, etcᕦ ᶘ ᵒ ㉨ ᵒ ᶅ ᕤ
williamtrask 4y ago
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.
- marban 4y ago
  Which doesn't solve the problem that the costs and barriers for generating mass disinformation have gone from somewhat low to zero.
  - williamtrask 4y ago
    Copy paste has been cheap for a long time.
    - waboremo 4y ago
      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.
- Veen 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
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."
rexreed 4y ago
Basically, a coin flip. Sounds like not better than chance.
Qem 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - RugnirViking 4y ago
    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
  - Jensson 4y ago
    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.
- GuB-42 4y ago
  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.
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
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.
bryanlarsen 4y ago
On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. -- Peter Steiner
Ygg2 4y ago
I can identify it with 100% accuracy. Just ask to tell a racist joke and wait for the prompt.
- 1970-01-01 4y ago
  Oh how quickly we forget Tay.ai
  - Ygg2 4y ago
    Tay has been banished to the shadow realm.
- TallGuyShort 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
rawoke083600 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
beltsazar 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - beltsazar 4y ago
    > happen to be always wrong Which is very very unlikely. When you don't know the answer, you'll guess, which is like flipping a coin. Suppose you have zero knowledge and always guess the answer. Can you get unlucky that you get more wrong answers than correct answers? Sure. But the more questions you get, the closer your accuracy is to 50%. Another way to look at it is to realize that a binary prediction has the highest entropy (uncertainty) when it splits fifty-fifty.
VikingCoder 4y ago
Isn't this basically like saying that they've passed the Turing Test?
jm_l 4y ago
>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.
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  For dating profiles I guess you have to expect the fake ones to try their best at being real, while the real ones have been trying their best at being fake since the beginning. Maybe they will cross paths and it will lead to a match made in heaven.
JolaBola 4y ago
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breakingrules 4y ago
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biccboii 4y ago
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.
pc_edwin 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
rchaud 4y ago
> 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.
- jnovek 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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.
    - inimino 4y ago
      Or you could wait until you have 5 flagged submissions from the same student, and then, I don't know, apply human scrutiny and your own good judgment?
ineedasername 4y ago
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.
AlexandrB 4y ago
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 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
  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 https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things
Mockapapella 4y ago
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
woeirua 4y ago
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.
antibasilisk 4y ago
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.
natch 4y ago
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.
avs733 4y ago
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.
- 4y ago
m0llusk 4y ago
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.
cryptonector 4y ago
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.
- aloisdg 4y ago
  Introvert people are going to love this.
  - blowski 4y ago
    I detect sarcasm, but perhaps not. This _will_ be good for those with dyslexia.
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    Just turn around and face the wall. It’s oral, not personal.
  - robcohen 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      > 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.
    - antifa 4y ago
      It's a good thing we use the scientific method instead of the I-just-feel-it method.
- lambdaba 4y ago
  Will we check ears for tiny bluetooth earbuds then?
cristobalBarry 4y ago
turnitin.com posted higher numbers, are they being dishonest you think?
29athrowaway 4y ago
I can also identify them 50% of the time, with a coin flip.
photochemsyn 4y ago
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.
- withinboredom 4y ago
  “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 4y ago
    Indeed. Shakespeare's portrayals of Macbeth and Richard III are infamous examples.
- itake 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
  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.
interestica 4y ago
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)?
dpweb 4y ago
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.
layer8 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    I don’t think these categories apply, because AI output is becoming actually indistinguishable from human utterances (which is their goal).
brachika 4y ago
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.
reducesuffering 4y ago
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."
karmasimida 4y ago
This means we can’t identify AI writers at all right?
jonplackett 4y ago
Shouldn’t this headline say ‘Research shows we 100% cannot identify AI writers’ 50% is just flipping a coin no?
jl2718 4y ago
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. "
wanderingmind 4y ago
As good as flipping a coin /s
datadeft 4y ago
I can do the same with a coin.
bilater 4y ago
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/ https://www.gptminus1.com/ Of course the text can be gibberish haha
EGreg 4y ago
So does 50% of the time mean we are no better than random chance?
SergeAx 4y ago
50% is an equivalent of a coin toss. We, of course, need an ML-powered tool to identify ML-generated digital junk.
strken 4y ago
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 4y ago
  But then it's either bullshit from an AI or bullshit from a human.
- macrolocal 4y ago
  This is especially true in math.
- teawrecks 4y ago
  Your comment only applies to the LLMs of today. Consider how much more bullshit the best natural language bot generated 10 years ago. The bullshit produced is dropping at an incredible rate. In a few short years we could very well have highly accurate expert AIs trained in virtually every field. Humans would be the ones generating bullshit and these bots would be used to spot it.
chanakya 4y ago
Isn't that the same as not identifying it at all? A random guess would be just as good.
magwa101 4y ago
Coin flip.
jwrallie 4y ago
The coin in my pocket can also identify AI writers about 50% of the time. Does it mean we cannot identify it?
- rl3 4y ago
  That coin may have a promising career ahead. You should foster its potential and mentor it.
bell-cot 4y ago
Reaction: Ask an old programmer - who has parented a few teenagers - how long a shell script would be needed to simulate a teenager's responses, on a "not in a communicative mood" day. If Alan Turing had been a parent, his "Turing Test" would have been quite different.
fuzzfactor 4y ago
So fooling people "50% of the time". Sooner or later the point could be reached where the percentage could be increased more so by focusing intensely on deception rather than further increasing computational power.
moi2388 4y ago
That might just mean human writers also tend to write garbage.
clircle 4y ago
Might not be able to tell if an AI wrote something general on the internet, but i can tell if joe down the hall wrote a subject matter specific email.

Sample size is 4,600 participants (over 6 experiments). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208839120 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208839120

wslh 4y ago

50%? Like flipping a coin? or flipping a coin is 25% if we think the identification of this 50% is 100% accurate.

zirgs 4y ago

If that text contains something that causes ChatGPT to respond with "As a language model..." then it's most likely written by a human.

lvl102 4y ago

We need to embrace AI with open arms.

rvba 4y ago
I, for one, welcome our AI overlords https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8lcUHQYhPTE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8lcUHQYhPTE
marginalia_nu 4y ago
Why is that?

inciampati 4y ago

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?

janekm 4y ago
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...)
- georgyo 4y ago
  South Park just did an episode with exactly this premise.
  - tudorw 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
      - asdff 4y ago
        "What are the latest words in use, human?" "I uhh I am not.." "Those words are already in my training set. What are the latest words in use, human? Compliance guarantees survival"
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  While filtering out badspeak.
vbezhenar 4y ago
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.

tjpnz 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
Why? Fist, if it should work, you'd need fuzzy fingerprints. Just changing a linebreak would alter the SHA sum. Secondly, why?
welder 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    Tweaking 1 char would change the checksum
    - tjpnz 4y ago

welder 4y ago

This is with humans... using automated tools it's even less than 50% accurate.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
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 4y ago
  But how do you know to invert your answer? You're assuming you know you're wrong.
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    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.
  - VincentEvans 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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!

aldousd666 4y ago

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

deleted 4y ago
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nonethewiser 4y ago
Depends. If 90% of the prompts are human generated then 50% accuracy is better than a coin flip.
- Aransentin 4y ago
  If 90% of the prompts are human couldn't you reach 90% accuracy by just picking "human" every time?

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

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.

Veen 4y ago
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 https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11156
- callahad 4y ago
  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.
  - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
    Welcome to the doom camp :)
macNchz 4y ago
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.

not_enoch_wise 4y ago

Racism: the only way to trust text content as genuinely human

ceejayoz 4y ago
For an extremely brief period that's already coming to an end. Unfettered GPT-alike models are already available.
rchaud 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.

Neuro_Gear 4y ago

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, etcᕦ ᶘ ᵒ ㉨ ᵒ ᶅ ᕤ

williamtrask 4y ago

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.

marban 4y ago
Which doesn't solve the problem that the costs and barriers for generating mass disinformation have gone from somewhat low to zero.
- williamtrask 4y ago
  Copy paste has been cheap for a long time.
  - waboremo 4y ago
    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.
Veen 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

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."

rexreed 4y ago

Basically, a coin flip. Sounds like not better than chance.

Qem 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.
- RugnirViking 4y ago
  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
- Jensson 4y ago
  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.
GuB-42 4y ago
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.

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

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.

bryanlarsen 4y ago

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. -- Peter Steiner

Ygg2 4y ago

I can identify it with 100% accuracy. Just ask to tell a racist joke and wait for the prompt.

1970-01-01 4y ago
Oh how quickly we forget Tay.ai
- Ygg2 4y ago
  Tay has been banished to the shadow realm.
TallGuyShort 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.

rawoke083600 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.

beltsazar 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.
- beltsazar 4y ago
  > happen to be always wrong Which is very very unlikely. When you don't know the answer, you'll guess, which is like flipping a coin. Suppose you have zero knowledge and always guess the answer. Can you get unlucky that you get more wrong answers than correct answers? Sure. But the more questions you get, the closer your accuracy is to 50%. Another way to look at it is to realize that a binary prediction has the highest entropy (uncertainty) when it splits fifty-fifty.

VikingCoder 4y ago

Isn't this basically like saying that they've passed the Turing Test?

jm_l 4y ago

>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.

fuzzfactor 4y ago
For dating profiles I guess you have to expect the fake ones to try their best at being real, while the real ones have been trying their best at being fake since the beginning. Maybe they will cross paths and it will lead to a match made in heaven.

JolaBola 4y ago

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breakingrules 4y ago

[dead]

biccboii 4y ago

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.

pc_edwin 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.

rchaud 4y ago

> 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.

jnovek 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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.
  - inimino 4y ago
    Or you could wait until you have 5 flagged submissions from the same student, and then, I don't know, apply human scrutiny and your own good judgment?

ineedasername 4y ago

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.

AlexandrB 4y ago

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 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
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 https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things

Mockapapella 4y ago

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

woeirua 4y ago

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.

antibasilisk 4y ago

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.

natch 4y ago

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.

avs733 4y ago

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.

4y ago

m0llusk 4y ago

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.

cryptonector 4y ago

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.

aloisdg 4y ago
Introvert people are going to love this.
- blowski 4y ago
  I detect sarcasm, but perhaps not. This _will_ be good for those with dyslexia.
- withinboredom 4y ago
  Just turn around and face the wall. It’s oral, not personal.
- robcohen 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    > 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.
  - antifa 4y ago
    It's a good thing we use the scientific method instead of the I-just-feel-it method.
lambdaba 4y ago
Will we check ears for tiny bluetooth earbuds then?

cristobalBarry 4y ago

turnitin.com posted higher numbers, are they being dishonest you think?

29athrowaway 4y ago

I can also identify them 50% of the time, with a coin flip.

photochemsyn 4y ago

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.

withinboredom 4y ago
“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 4y ago
  Indeed. Shakespeare's portrayals of Macbeth and Richard III are infamous examples.
itake 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
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.

interestica 4y ago

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)?

dpweb 4y ago

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.

layer8 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  I don’t think these categories apply, because AI output is becoming actually indistinguishable from human utterances (which is their goal).

brachika 4y ago

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.

reducesuffering 4y ago

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."

karmasimida 4y ago

This means we can’t identify AI writers at all right?

jonplackett 4y ago

Shouldn’t this headline say ‘Research shows we 100% cannot identify AI writers’ 50% is just flipping a coin no?

jl2718 4y ago

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. "

wanderingmind 4y ago

As good as flipping a coin /s

datadeft 4y ago

I can do the same with a coin.

bilater 4y ago

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/ https://www.gptminus1.com/ Of course the text can be gibberish haha

EGreg 4y ago

So does 50% of the time mean we are no better than random chance?

SergeAx 4y ago

50% is an equivalent of a coin toss. We, of course, need an ML-powered tool to identify ML-generated digital junk.

strken 4y ago

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 4y ago
But then it's either bullshit from an AI or bullshit from a human.
macrolocal 4y ago
This is especially true in math.
teawrecks 4y ago
Your comment only applies to the LLMs of today. Consider how much more bullshit the best natural language bot generated 10 years ago. The bullshit produced is dropping at an incredible rate. In a few short years we could very well have highly accurate expert AIs trained in virtually every field. Humans would be the ones generating bullshit and these bots would be used to spot it.

chanakya 4y ago

Isn't that the same as not identifying it at all? A random guess would be just as good.

magwa101 4y ago

Coin flip.

jwrallie 4y ago

The coin in my pocket can also identify AI writers about 50% of the time. Does it mean we cannot identify it?

rl3 4y ago
That coin may have a promising career ahead. You should foster its potential and mentor it.

bell-cot 4y ago

Reaction: Ask an old programmer - who has parented a few teenagers - how long a shell script would be needed to simulate a teenager's responses, on a "not in a communicative mood" day. If Alan Turing had been a parent, his "Turing Test" would have been quite different.

fuzzfactor 4y ago

So fooling people "50% of the time". Sooner or later the point could be reached where the percentage could be increased more so by focusing intensely on deception rather than further increasing computational power.

moi2388 4y ago

That might just mean human writers also tend to write garbage.

clircle 4y ago

Might not be able to tell if an AI wrote something general on the internet, but i can tell if joe down the hall wrote a subject matter specific email.