4 ms·

I want to see an "AI detector" that just marks everything as being not AI generated. Then, whenever someone is accused of using an AI by some nameless website,

I want to see an "AI detector" that just marks everything as being not AI generated. Then, whenever someone is accused of using an AI by some nameless website, they can present their own website that shows they didn't use AI. Professor: "The website said you used an AI." Student: "Well, here's a website claiming I didn't use an AI." Professor: "I don't know if I believe that website, let's look into the merits of how it works." Student: "Yes, let's do that." Professor: ...

Kim_Bruning 3y ago
What you want is a sort of AI Witches' Scales? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oudewater#Buildings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oudewater#Buildings
- jdiff 3y ago
  Not quite. Oudewater offered fair scales. What this guy's talking about are still rigged scales, just oppositely rigged scales. The only reason nobody was ever found a witch there was because the underlying concepts were BS.
  - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
    You're not wrong. I'm trying to think if you can indeed do something with a fair test.
  - kykeonaut 3y ago
    Isn't the underlying concept of AI detectors BS as well? You could say something like "We cannot guarantee beyond reasonable doubt that this content is AI generated". Which one could argue is also always true.
    - margalabargala 3y ago
      This is something that I suspect will get easier in the next couple years as AI research progresses. I could imagine some sort of reversal tool being made such that "given this output and these weights files, how likely is it that these weights produced this output with a reasonable input?" I don't know, that might be incredibly difficult forever, or it might be something that someone has a breakthrough in and manages to do. Perhaps it's only useful for particularly egregious examples, and wouldn't be able to detect an AI text that was subsequently edited. That would be fine. When I was a TA in college, we ran students' papers through a plagiarism detector, which would spit out some % number based on what it thought was the amount/likelihood of plagiarism. The number itself was bunk, but across a class of 30 people, if one or two papers had much higher numbers than the other 28, I could click and look at it's justification. Sometimes it was a meaningless false positive, other times it was "here are the paragraphs that were copied verbatim from Wikipedia".
      - wongarsu 3y ago
        There also seems to be some willingness to have the models watermark their content, and LLMs provide very subtle methods to do so. For example for sufficiently long texts you could bias the token selection to achieve a very specific frequency for certain words; and declare any text where the word "the" makes up between 5.1% and 5.7% of all words, and "which" about 1% of all words to likely be generated by that AI. One major issue is the feedback loop: There is lots of entrophy to hide a signal in regular English (whether you follow the methods of Stylometry or Steganography), and even an unmodified AI model has a stylometric signature. But if a significant portion of text we consume ends up being written by a handful of AI models, over time people will adopt many of these features. This is obvious right now, with ChatGPT having a certain writing style and some people unconsciously copying that style, and it will remain true no matter how subtle these things become.
      - lazystar 3y ago
        > that might be incredibly difficult forever, or it might be something that someone has a breakthrough in and manages to do. well, why not train an AI on it?
  - saghm 3y ago
    Sure but...since no one actually is a witch (in the sense they were testing for), a fair scale is also one guaranteed to say that they're not a witch.
- manifoldgeo 3y ago
  From the linked article: " After the weighing, they received an official certificate proclaiming them not a witch... Certificates would state that 'the body weight is in proportion to its build'. The reasoning behind this is the old belief that a witch has no soul and therefore weighs significantly less than an ordinary person". I love this piece of history so much, thank you for sharing it! Adding this one to my bookmarks :-)
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    Which is obviously misguided. You can't determine from somebody's BMI if they have a soul. A soul only weighs three quarters of an ounce [1], or about 1/10th a cup of coffee. Well within even the daily variation of a person's body weight. (/s) 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_grams_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_grams_experiment
    - progne 3y ago
      Does my soul look fat? Is it good or bad to have an obese or skinny soul? Do they float? Are they charged, can you trap one in a Faraday cage? Is that what the Ghostbusters were collecting?
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    Also: “The Waag is still open as a tourist attraction, and official certificates are available.” Maybe with modern science we can make someone much lighter than they ought to be. (Put helium in their stomach?) Then they would be forced to issue a certificate that said that they could not guarantee that the person is not a witch :D
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  Presumably the scales have at some point vindicated an actual witch in error.
vijayr02 3y ago
Surely this is trivial to refute? The professor just needs to have his own text that he generated using AI. When your website says it's not AI... then it's curtains I guess?
- raincole 3y ago
  The student just needs to find a pre-2022 article that is mistakenly marked as AI by the professor's detector. It's harder but probably not that hard.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    Ideally, what the student should probably do is get ahold of as much of the professors own work as possible and feed it through the detector. While pre-AI work might be best for proving that the site can't possibly be reliable, post-AI work is probably better for convincing the professor that the consequences of treating the site as reliable are bad for him.
- Buttons840 3y ago
  By the time a professor is this engaged and thinking this logically, the student has already won.
- usrbinbash 3y ago
  It would be, if the professors website wouldn't suffer from false negatives as well. Which it most certainly will.
bee_rider 3y ago
Students are in a weird case. Currently instructors aren’t experts in AI tools because, well, they didn’t exist 10 years ago when even the young professors were learning how to do things. The best that can be done at the moment is to teach the old way. The current students are the ones who will need to make the AI based workflows. But obviating intro assignments by having the AI do them doesn’t benefit anybody.
- __loam 3y ago
  If students what to deprive themselves of the opportunity to learn then that's their perogative.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    Universities need to produce competent graduates at a good rate to maintain their reputation.
  - alpinisme 3y ago
    Yes but this only further waters down the already watered down legitimacy of a degree. I know a lot of people think students should be building things independently of classes but that kind of misses the point of dedicating a full time investment in guided learning at the hands of an expert instructor. If instructors graded rigorously and had a magic cheating detection too (where cheating is defined overly capaciously so that students really and unambiguously have to get creative in their work), then the degree might mean something
    - alwayslikethis 3y ago
      The university system is rather outdated at this stage anyways. As an institution of learning there is still a place for universities in terms of research and inquiry, but degrees seem like an outdated concept. Maybe we can break down degrees to certifications that can be pieced together to demonstrate a set of skills. Maybe we can value independent projects more. The academic system is so broken at this point that I don't think much value will be lost if they lost all credibility, and let them scramble to create some more value.
ryanjshaw 3y ago
Since the AI detectors are snake oil, just run a bunch of the professor's articles through them until you get one flagged as AI generated and present those results for a rapid reassessment.
janalsncm 3y ago
I made this one a while back https://isthiswrittenbyai.surge.sh/ https://isthiswrittenbyai.surge.sh/

Kim_Bruning 3y ago

What you want is a sort of AI Witches' Scales? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oudewater#Buildings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oudewater#Buildings

jdiff 3y ago
Not quite. Oudewater offered fair scales. What this guy's talking about are still rigged scales, just oppositely rigged scales. The only reason nobody was ever found a witch there was because the underlying concepts were BS.
- Kim_Bruning 3y ago
  You're not wrong. I'm trying to think if you can indeed do something with a fair test.
- kykeonaut 3y ago
  Isn't the underlying concept of AI detectors BS as well? You could say something like "We cannot guarantee beyond reasonable doubt that this content is AI generated". Which one could argue is also always true.
  - margalabargala 3y ago
    This is something that I suspect will get easier in the next couple years as AI research progresses. I could imagine some sort of reversal tool being made such that "given this output and these weights files, how likely is it that these weights produced this output with a reasonable input?" I don't know, that might be incredibly difficult forever, or it might be something that someone has a breakthrough in and manages to do. Perhaps it's only useful for particularly egregious examples, and wouldn't be able to detect an AI text that was subsequently edited. That would be fine. When I was a TA in college, we ran students' papers through a plagiarism detector, which would spit out some % number based on what it thought was the amount/likelihood of plagiarism. The number itself was bunk, but across a class of 30 people, if one or two papers had much higher numbers than the other 28, I could click and look at it's justification. Sometimes it was a meaningless false positive, other times it was "here are the paragraphs that were copied verbatim from Wikipedia".
    - wongarsu 3y ago
      There also seems to be some willingness to have the models watermark their content, and LLMs provide very subtle methods to do so. For example for sufficiently long texts you could bias the token selection to achieve a very specific frequency for certain words; and declare any text where the word "the" makes up between 5.1% and 5.7% of all words, and "which" about 1% of all words to likely be generated by that AI. One major issue is the feedback loop: There is lots of entrophy to hide a signal in regular English (whether you follow the methods of Stylometry or Steganography), and even an unmodified AI model has a stylometric signature. But if a significant portion of text we consume ends up being written by a handful of AI models, over time people will adopt many of these features. This is obvious right now, with ChatGPT having a certain writing style and some people unconsciously copying that style, and it will remain true no matter how subtle these things become.
    - lazystar 3y ago
      > that might be incredibly difficult forever, or it might be something that someone has a breakthrough in and manages to do. well, why not train an AI on it?
- saghm 3y ago
  Sure but...since no one actually is a witch (in the sense they were testing for), a fair scale is also one guaranteed to say that they're not a witch.
manifoldgeo 3y ago
From the linked article: " After the weighing, they received an official certificate proclaiming them not a witch... Certificates would state that 'the body weight is in proportion to its build'. The reasoning behind this is the old belief that a witch has no soul and therefore weighs significantly less than an ordinary person". I love this piece of history so much, thank you for sharing it! Adding this one to my bookmarks :-)
- wongarsu 3y ago
  Which is obviously misguided. You can't determine from somebody's BMI if they have a soul. A soul only weighs three quarters of an ounce [1], or about 1/10th a cup of coffee. Well within even the daily variation of a person's body weight. (/s) 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_grams_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_grams_experiment
  - progne 3y ago
    Does my soul look fat? Is it good or bad to have an obese or skinny soul? Do they float? Are they charged, can you trap one in a Faraday cage? Is that what the Ghostbusters were collecting?
- codetrotter 3y ago
  Also: “The Waag is still open as a tourist attraction, and official certificates are available.” Maybe with modern science we can make someone much lighter than they ought to be. (Put helium in their stomach?) Then they would be forced to issue a certificate that said that they could not guarantee that the person is not a witch :D
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
Presumably the scales have at some point vindicated an actual witch in error.

vijayr02 3y ago

Surely this is trivial to refute? The professor just needs to have his own text that he generated using AI. When your website says it's not AI... then it's curtains I guess?

raincole 3y ago
The student just needs to find a pre-2022 article that is mistakenly marked as AI by the professor's detector. It's harder but probably not that hard.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  Ideally, what the student should probably do is get ahold of as much of the professors own work as possible and feed it through the detector. While pre-AI work might be best for proving that the site can't possibly be reliable, post-AI work is probably better for convincing the professor that the consequences of treating the site as reliable are bad for him.
Buttons840 3y ago
By the time a professor is this engaged and thinking this logically, the student has already won.
usrbinbash 3y ago
It would be, if the professors website wouldn't suffer from false negatives as well. Which it most certainly will.

bee_rider 3y ago

Students are in a weird case. Currently instructors aren’t experts in AI tools because, well, they didn’t exist 10 years ago when even the young professors were learning how to do things. The best that can be done at the moment is to teach the old way. The current students are the ones who will need to make the AI based workflows. But obviating intro assignments by having the AI do them doesn’t benefit anybody.

__loam 3y ago
If students what to deprive themselves of the opportunity to learn then that's their perogative.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Universities need to produce competent graduates at a good rate to maintain their reputation.
- alpinisme 3y ago
  Yes but this only further waters down the already watered down legitimacy of a degree. I know a lot of people think students should be building things independently of classes but that kind of misses the point of dedicating a full time investment in guided learning at the hands of an expert instructor. If instructors graded rigorously and had a magic cheating detection too (where cheating is defined overly capaciously so that students really and unambiguously have to get creative in their work), then the degree might mean something
  - alwayslikethis 3y ago
    The university system is rather outdated at this stage anyways. As an institution of learning there is still a place for universities in terms of research and inquiry, but degrees seem like an outdated concept. Maybe we can break down degrees to certifications that can be pieced together to demonstrate a set of skills. Maybe we can value independent projects more. The academic system is so broken at this point that I don't think much value will be lost if they lost all credibility, and let them scramble to create some more value.

ryanjshaw 3y ago

Since the AI detectors are snake oil, just run a bunch of the professor's articles through them until you get one flagged as AI generated and present those results for a rapid reassessment.

janalsncm 3y ago

I made this one a while back https://isthiswrittenbyai.surge.sh/ https://isthiswrittenbyai.surge.sh/