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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

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.
bamboozled 4y ago
Machines lie. Machines tell the truth. That’s something I never thought I’d hear. Sad development.
- sdoering 4y ago
  Machines don't lie. There is no intention of misleading someone behind wrong statements from a machine. I could lie to you while still stating something that is factually correct but intentionally misleading. Imagine me standing in front of the White House, taking my phone and calling the Meta or Google press bureau. I could say, I am calling from the White House (factually correct) but would imply, that I am calling in an official capacity. And while I know that this is a contrived example, I hope it clarifies my point of intentional deception being the identifying element of a lie. And this intentional misleading is what I deny machines to exhibit. Still the quote authoritative sounding texts that AI produce (or human text farm monkeys for that matter) force us to think about how we evaluate factfulness and how we qualify sources. Not an easy task before AI and by far even more difficult after AI imho.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    > And while I know that this is a contrived example, I hope it clarifies my point of intentional deception being the identifying element of a lie. Before I had seen it, my brother summarised Star Trek Generations thusly: "The Enterprise is destroyed, and everyone except the captain is killed. Then the captain of the Enterprise is killed."
    - kreeben 4y ago
      I was gonna watch that tonight. Thx a bunch. Have you seen Million Dollar Baby? Let me tell you a little something about that movie. She dies.
  - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
    >Machines don't lie. What about that viral story about the Taskrabbit captchas and a bot lying about being a visually impaired human?
IIAOPSW 4y ago
Exactly. Read the board not the players.
tveita 4y ago
In relevant studies, people attempt to discriminate lies from truths in real time with no special aids or training. In these circumstances, people achieve an average of 54% correct lie-truth judgments, correctly classifying 47% of lies as deceptive and 61% of truths as nondeceptive. [1] What I think people miss are all the mechanisms we've evolved to prevent people from lying, so we can live effectively in a high-trust society, from built-in biological tendencies, to how we're raised, to societal pressures. "People lie too" but in 95% of cases they don't. If someone on Hacker News say they prefer Zig to Rust or that they liked the Dune movie, they're likely telling the truth. There's no incentive either way, we've just evolved as social creatures that share little bits of information and reputation. And to lie, yes, and to expose the lies of others, but only when there's a big payoff to defect. If you had a friend that kept telling you about their trips to restaurants that didn't actually exist, or a junior developer at work that made up fictional APIs when they didn't know the answer to a question, you'd tell them to stop, and if they kept at it you probably wouldn't care to hang out with them. ChatGPT seems to bypass those natural defenses for now. Most people think they are hard to deceive. But I see plenty people here on HN with confidently wrong beliefs about how ChatGPT works, that they've gotten from asking ChatGPT about itself. It's not intuitive for us that ChatGPT actually knows very little about how itself works. It even took humanity a while to realize that "How does it feel like my body works" isn't a great way to figure out biology. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327957pspr1003_2 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327957pspr10...
- DoughnutHole 4y ago
  For humans there's a social cost to wild lies and fabrications, even if one is otherwise generally reliable. I would probably consider a person who is wrong 50% of the time but can reason about how they came to a conclusion and the limits of their knowledge/certainty to be more reliable than someone who is correct 90% of the time but lies/fabricates/hallucinates the other 10% of what they say. If a human acting in good faith is pressed for the evidence for something they said that is untrue, they will probably give a hazy recollection of how they got the information ("I think I read it in a NYT article", etc). They might be indignant, but they won't fabricate an equally erroneous trail of citations. ChatGPT produces some shockingly good text, but the rate of hallucinations and its inability to reliably reason about either correct or incorrect statements would be enough to mark a human as untrustworthy. The fact that LLMs can produce plausible, authoritative text that appears well evidenced, and can convincingly argue its validity regardless of any actual truth does however mean that we might be entering an era of ever more accessible and convincing fraud and misinformation.
thanatropism 4y ago
Machines lie very effectively. Machines plainly have more resources, while people give all kinds of metadata that they're lying. It used to be that if someone had a lot of details ready at hand they were probably truth-tellers, since details are tiresome to fabricate. But ChatGPT can talk math-into-code with me for an hour, occasionally asking for clarification (which makes me clarify my thinking) and still lead me to a totally nonsensical path, including realistic code that imports libraries I know to be relevant, and then relies on classes/functions that don't exist. Fool me once, shame on me.
LegitShady 4y ago
You're right accountability but the issue goes even as far as copyright eligibility - only human authored works are eligible for copyright or patent protection so being able to detect ai writing is critical to keeping intellectual property from being flooded with non human generated spam that would have large corporations own pieces of potential human thinking in the future.
DeathArrow 4y ago
> What matters is accountability, not method of generation. Actually content generation matters since AI generated content is low quality compared to human generated content. When is not blatantly false and misleading.
drowsspa 4y ago
Seems like the future is trustless, what we need is a way to codify this trust just like we do with our real-life acquaintances
- burnished 4y ago
  That does not follow, and how is trust even codified? Are you keeping a list of people and permissions? Fundamentally though most of our society depends on a high degree of trust and stops functioning almost immediately if that trust becomes significantly tarnished. Going 'trustless' in human communities probably looks like small communities with strong initial distrust for strangers.
  - drowsspa 4y ago
    Yeah, should have re-checked, I mean trustful. Now it's too late. I meant exactly what you said, society itself requires a high degree of trust. The digital world will require it as well
    - burnished 4y ago
      Ah fair enough!
breakingrules 4y ago
[dead]
gspencley 4y ago
Yeah it's a binary proposition (AI or human) and if the success rate is 50/50 then it's pure chance and it means we likely can't identify AI vs human-generated at all. Which is fine. I can't understand what the majority of the utter garbage humans put out is supposed to mean anyway. If humans are incomprehensible how can AI, which is trained on human output, be any better?
marcuskaz 4y ago
> Machines lie. Machines tell the truth. ChatGPT generates text based on input from a human who takes the output and does something with it. The machine is not really the one in control and lying or telling the truth. It's the person that does something with it.
scotty79 4y ago
> I bet our ability to detect when a person is lieing isn't any better than 50% either. If I ask about math, I can do way better.
tyingq 4y ago
That helps for copy with a byline that's supposed to map to a known person. There's lots of copy that doesn't, but still content that matters.
JohnFen 4y ago
Depending on the context, it can matter a great deal whether or not it came from a human. Whether or not it contains lies is a separate issue. The inability to reliably tell if something is machine-generated is, in my opinion, the most dangerous thing about the tool.

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.

bamboozled 4y ago

Machines lie. Machines tell the truth. That’s something I never thought I’d hear. Sad development.

sdoering 4y ago
Machines don't lie. There is no intention of misleading someone behind wrong statements from a machine. I could lie to you while still stating something that is factually correct but intentionally misleading. Imagine me standing in front of the White House, taking my phone and calling the Meta or Google press bureau. I could say, I am calling from the White House (factually correct) but would imply, that I am calling in an official capacity. And while I know that this is a contrived example, I hope it clarifies my point of intentional deception being the identifying element of a lie. And this intentional misleading is what I deny machines to exhibit. Still the quote authoritative sounding texts that AI produce (or human text farm monkeys for that matter) force us to think about how we evaluate factfulness and how we qualify sources. Not an easy task before AI and by far even more difficult after AI imho.
- ben_w 4y ago
  > And while I know that this is a contrived example, I hope it clarifies my point of intentional deception being the identifying element of a lie. Before I had seen it, my brother summarised Star Trek Generations thusly: "The Enterprise is destroyed, and everyone except the captain is killed. Then the captain of the Enterprise is killed."
  - kreeben 4y ago
    I was gonna watch that tonight. Thx a bunch. Have you seen Million Dollar Baby? Let me tell you a little something about that movie. She dies.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  >Machines don't lie. What about that viral story about the Taskrabbit captchas and a bot lying about being a visually impaired human?

IIAOPSW 4y ago

Exactly. Read the board not the players.

tveita 4y ago

In relevant studies, people attempt to discriminate lies from truths in real time with no special aids or training. In these circumstances, people achieve an average of 54% correct lie-truth judgments, correctly classifying 47% of lies as deceptive and 61% of truths as nondeceptive. [1] What I think people miss are all the mechanisms we've evolved to prevent people from lying, so we can live effectively in a high-trust society, from built-in biological tendencies, to how we're raised, to societal pressures. "People lie too" but in 95% of cases they don't. If someone on Hacker News say they prefer Zig to Rust or that they liked the Dune movie, they're likely telling the truth. There's no incentive either way, we've just evolved as social creatures that share little bits of information and reputation. And to lie, yes, and to expose the lies of others, but only when there's a big payoff to defect. If you had a friend that kept telling you about their trips to restaurants that didn't actually exist, or a junior developer at work that made up fictional APIs when they didn't know the answer to a question, you'd tell them to stop, and if they kept at it you probably wouldn't care to hang out with them. ChatGPT seems to bypass those natural defenses for now. Most people think they are hard to deceive. But I see plenty people here on HN with confidently wrong beliefs about how ChatGPT works, that they've gotten from asking ChatGPT about itself. It's not intuitive for us that ChatGPT actually knows very little about how itself works. It even took humanity a while to realize that "How does it feel like my body works" isn't a great way to figure out biology. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327957pspr1003_2 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327957pspr10...

DoughnutHole 4y ago
For humans there's a social cost to wild lies and fabrications, even if one is otherwise generally reliable. I would probably consider a person who is wrong 50% of the time but can reason about how they came to a conclusion and the limits of their knowledge/certainty to be more reliable than someone who is correct 90% of the time but lies/fabricates/hallucinates the other 10% of what they say. If a human acting in good faith is pressed for the evidence for something they said that is untrue, they will probably give a hazy recollection of how they got the information ("I think I read it in a NYT article", etc). They might be indignant, but they won't fabricate an equally erroneous trail of citations. ChatGPT produces some shockingly good text, but the rate of hallucinations and its inability to reliably reason about either correct or incorrect statements would be enough to mark a human as untrustworthy. The fact that LLMs can produce plausible, authoritative text that appears well evidenced, and can convincingly argue its validity regardless of any actual truth does however mean that we might be entering an era of ever more accessible and convincing fraud and misinformation.

thanatropism 4y ago

Machines lie very effectively. Machines plainly have more resources, while people give all kinds of metadata that they're lying. It used to be that if someone had a lot of details ready at hand they were probably truth-tellers, since details are tiresome to fabricate. But ChatGPT can talk math-into-code with me for an hour, occasionally asking for clarification (which makes me clarify my thinking) and still lead me to a totally nonsensical path, including realistic code that imports libraries I know to be relevant, and then relies on classes/functions that don't exist. Fool me once, shame on me.

LegitShady 4y ago

You're right accountability but the issue goes even as far as copyright eligibility - only human authored works are eligible for copyright or patent protection so being able to detect ai writing is critical to keeping intellectual property from being flooded with non human generated spam that would have large corporations own pieces of potential human thinking in the future.

DeathArrow 4y ago

> What matters is accountability, not method of generation. Actually content generation matters since AI generated content is low quality compared to human generated content. When is not blatantly false and misleading.

drowsspa 4y ago

Seems like the future is trustless, what we need is a way to codify this trust just like we do with our real-life acquaintances

burnished 4y ago
That does not follow, and how is trust even codified? Are you keeping a list of people and permissions? Fundamentally though most of our society depends on a high degree of trust and stops functioning almost immediately if that trust becomes significantly tarnished. Going 'trustless' in human communities probably looks like small communities with strong initial distrust for strangers.
- drowsspa 4y ago
  Yeah, should have re-checked, I mean trustful. Now it's too late. I meant exactly what you said, society itself requires a high degree of trust. The digital world will require it as well
  - burnished 4y ago
    Ah fair enough!

breakingrules 4y ago

[dead]

gspencley 4y ago

Yeah it's a binary proposition (AI or human) and if the success rate is 50/50 then it's pure chance and it means we likely can't identify AI vs human-generated at all. Which is fine. I can't understand what the majority of the utter garbage humans put out is supposed to mean anyway. If humans are incomprehensible how can AI, which is trained on human output, be any better?

marcuskaz 4y ago

> Machines lie. Machines tell the truth. ChatGPT generates text based on input from a human who takes the output and does something with it. The machine is not really the one in control and lying or telling the truth. It's the person that does something with it.

scotty79 4y ago

> I bet our ability to detect when a person is lieing isn't any better than 50% either. If I ask about math, I can do way better.

tyingq 4y ago

That helps for copy with a byline that's supposed to map to a known person. There's lots of copy that doesn't, but still content that matters.

JohnFen 4y ago

Depending on the context, it can matter a great deal whether or not it came from a human. Whether or not it contains lies is a separate issue. The inability to reliably tell if something is machine-generated is, in my opinion, the most dangerous thing about the tool.