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I was one of the people who said that using AI detection is a bad idea on that last link. Really, those AI detection tools are extremely unreliable and it’s a b

I was one of the people who said that using AI detection is a bad idea on that last link. Really, those AI detection tools are extremely unreliable and it’s a bad idea to use them for anything import like moderation decisions. I’m not against trying to stop bots or anything but doing it in a way that will harm real users more than bots is a bad idea

waboremo 4y ago
As in you were in that very thread? Cool coincidence if so! But yeah generally I agree about the tooling, they're relying on methods that seem to be even more superficial and random than username pattern matching, and we really should be turning to the likes of Bard and OpenAI to instead implement solutions to make that easier.
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  Embeddings are great for this, capture all posts by all people in the sub and embed them, then cluster users by their overall position and the distances between their posts, etc, to profile them ideologically and single-issue wise, and then graph the links between similarly located users. Do they post in a web, or a tag-team way that differentiates them from other users? And then also color these by the average response time, etc. But don't rely on these types metrics because they're the easiest to avoid by simply delaying responses based on their length and complexity, plus a random discovery time, plus a time-of-day dependent offset. And then, potentially just issue warnings. "You've been detected participating in a brigading fashion, and bot or not, may be banned if this continues" and see what changes.
  - kranke155 4y ago
    How can you do this on Reddit ?
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
  > As in you were in that very thread? Looks like it. https://old.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/11vw6qp/posting_aiwritten_content_will_result_in_a/jcv8h9o/ https://old.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/11vw6qp/post...
  - circuit10 4y ago
    Yes, that’s me!
godelski 4y ago
This is one of those conversations, as an AI researcher, that I tend to not like. There's two major voices and both are ridiculous. Neither should we completely rely on these tools and neither should we throw them out. It is a cat and mouse game, and yes, the mouse will always win. We're on hacker news, and everyone knows this same game exists for hackers and the advantage bias is similar. Doesn't mean we shouldn't stop trying to defend against the hackers. But ML requires a lot of nuance. We've already been using automated tools to ban people and we all know how frustrating that is. There have been several subreddits that would ban anyone that used the term "vaccines" because they wanted to protect their subreddits from anti-vaxxers but these backfire and also autoban people defending vaccines. The problem isn't using these systems, the problem is that there is no nuance. No way to reach a human who can see the absurdity. But this has been a progression and even bureaucratic institutions do this with real humans. This is a frustration we all experience and we shouldn't make this worse. Use the tools, but always maintain a way to reach a human who can account for system failures. An important issue with ML system failures is that when they fail, they fail bad. Anyone who has used GPT should be well aware of this and have experienced it (if you haven't, you haven't used it much, are incredibly lucky, or have been duped). It is also the reason AlphaGo lost that one game, and it played REALLY poorly. These higher dimensional spaces are rather complex and don't fit your intuitions. You'll have a better idea of how to stroll through flat land than you will through 10D land, let alone 2562563 (an image) land. The curse of dimensionality is that any intuition you have of geometrical meaning goes out the window.

waboremo 4y ago

As in you were in that very thread? Cool coincidence if so! But yeah generally I agree about the tooling, they're relying on methods that seem to be even more superficial and random than username pattern matching, and we really should be turning to the likes of Bard and OpenAI to instead implement solutions to make that easier.

LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
Embeddings are great for this, capture all posts by all people in the sub and embed them, then cluster users by their overall position and the distances between their posts, etc, to profile them ideologically and single-issue wise, and then graph the links between similarly located users. Do they post in a web, or a tag-team way that differentiates them from other users? And then also color these by the average response time, etc. But don't rely on these types metrics because they're the easiest to avoid by simply delaying responses based on their length and complexity, plus a random discovery time, plus a time-of-day dependent offset. And then, potentially just issue warnings. "You've been detected participating in a brigading fashion, and bot or not, may be banned if this continues" and see what changes.
- kranke155 4y ago
  How can you do this on Reddit ?
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
> As in you were in that very thread? Looks like it. https://old.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/11vw6qp/posting_aiwritten_content_will_result_in_a/jcv8h9o/ https://old.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/11vw6qp/post...
- circuit10 4y ago
  Yes, that’s me!

godelski 4y ago

This is one of those conversations, as an AI researcher, that I tend to not like. There's two major voices and both are ridiculous. Neither should we completely rely on these tools and neither should we throw them out. It is a cat and mouse game, and yes, the mouse will always win. We're on hacker news, and everyone knows this same game exists for hackers and the advantage bias is similar. Doesn't mean we shouldn't stop trying to defend against the hackers. But ML requires a lot of nuance. We've already been using automated tools to ban people and we all know how frustrating that is. There have been several subreddits that would ban anyone that used the term "vaccines" because they wanted to protect their subreddits from anti-vaxxers but these backfire and also autoban people defending vaccines. The problem isn't using these systems, the problem is that there is no nuance. No way to reach a human who can see the absurdity. But this has been a progression and even bureaucratic institutions do this with real humans. This is a frustration we all experience and we shouldn't make this worse. Use the tools, but always maintain a way to reach a human who can account for system failures. An important issue with ML system failures is that when they fail, they fail bad. Anyone who has used GPT should be well aware of this and have experienced it (if you haven't, you haven't used it much, are incredibly lucky, or have been duped). It is also the reason AlphaGo lost that one game, and it played REALLY poorly. These higher dimensional spaces are rather complex and don't fit your intuitions. You'll have a better idea of how to stroll through flat land than you will through 10D land, let alone 2562563 (an image) land. The curse of dimensionality is that any intuition you have of geometrical meaning goes out the window.