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> I now plan to use Git and GitHub for all my writing from day one, and to document changes every day. It’s not an ironclad system, but it has given me some pea

> I now plan to use Git and GitHub for all my writing from day one, and to document changes every day. It’s not an ironclad system, but it has given me some peace of mind — not to mention, a paper trail that clearly shows a manuscript written slowly and painstakingly, and without ChatGPT. It probably won't be too long before someone creates a tool to create fake Git/Github entries to "prove" a document was written by a human after it was actually ChatGPT-generated.

nomonnai 3y ago
I am afraid you're right. On the other hand, in my experience, writing an academic text is rarely straightforward, with a lot of forth-and-back involved. Ultimately, a human must decide whether the diffs look more like such a pattern or a script-generated one. Edit. Btw, you can use Git with Word's docx-format out of the box. Docx is a zip folder with XML inside; git-diff will show text changes. Further, there's git-merge-driver for merging various file formats (https://github.com/Praqma/git-merge-driver https://github.com/Praqma/git-merge-driver).
zettabomb 3y ago
Unfortunately, as with filesystem dates, git dates are trivially modified. I don't even think writing such a tool would be difficult either - space out the commits semi-randomly within the time of day you might be writing, add a few paragraphs each time (potentially in different sections), occasionally go back and rewrite a sentence or two. It's not proof of anything, but then what do we need to prove that yes, I really wrote this myself? A record of every keystroke and mouse click? A recording of my screen while writing? A recording of my webcam while writing? All seem either fakeable today or very soon. I'm probably just not smart enough but I can't figure out how to truly prove your (human) authorship. To some extent though I'm also not sure how much it matters. If the science is sound, the text is well written, and the paper is well presented, why do I care who wrote the text? I didn't handwrite the graphs or the tables of data, that was a script. Nor did I typeset every letter, that was LaTeX. The text isn't even any different in nature, like the difference between an original oil painting and a print of the same. It's ultimately just a means to communicate ideas from my mind to yours. Perhaps it is ethical to disclose the use of generative AI, but I'm not convinced that would be any better in the minds of the reviewers in question here. I just don't see a substantiative difference if the end product ultimately is high quality. For what it's worth, I wasn't a great student (good at learning, yes, good at going through the motions to get good grades, not so much) and despite what some might call an academic approach to most problems I'm not really a fan of academia itself. There's a lot of stuffy old practices, like p-value being the metric for so many things despite the knowledge that it can be "hacked", and weird, unknowable financial or political motives that you'll never be privy to, which in my opinion compromise the integrity of the work more than use of generative AI does while also being harder to detect. I'm certainly not the first to point these issues and I won't be the one to solve it. I do wonder though if the whole thing is kinda broken, ChatGPT or not.
popalchemist 3y ago
Since one could ostensibly use ChatGPT to make the commits, this entire idea is moot. The paranoia we are seeing now will slowly fade. It doesn't make sense to adopt extreme measures, especially since the truthiness of any claim as to creative originality becomes more dubious with every day. Even if you hand-wrote and mailed a copy of your manuscripts one page at a time to the US Copyright Office, that would not suffice, since from the moment ChatGPT was made public, you could have been using it, then transfering your thoughts to paper. Just live your life.

nomonnai 3y ago

I am afraid you're right. On the other hand, in my experience, writing an academic text is rarely straightforward, with a lot of forth-and-back involved. Ultimately, a human must decide whether the diffs look more like such a pattern or a script-generated one. Edit. Btw, you can use Git with Word's docx-format out of the box. Docx is a zip folder with XML inside; git-diff will show text changes. Further, there's git-merge-driver for merging various file formats (https://github.com/Praqma/git-merge-driver https://github.com/Praqma/git-merge-driver).

zettabomb 3y ago

Unfortunately, as with filesystem dates, git dates are trivially modified. I don't even think writing such a tool would be difficult either - space out the commits semi-randomly within the time of day you might be writing, add a few paragraphs each time (potentially in different sections), occasionally go back and rewrite a sentence or two. It's not proof of anything, but then what do we need to prove that yes, I really wrote this myself? A record of every keystroke and mouse click? A recording of my screen while writing? A recording of my webcam while writing? All seem either fakeable today or very soon. I'm probably just not smart enough but I can't figure out how to truly prove your (human) authorship. To some extent though I'm also not sure how much it matters. If the science is sound, the text is well written, and the paper is well presented, why do I care who wrote the text? I didn't handwrite the graphs or the tables of data, that was a script. Nor did I typeset every letter, that was LaTeX. The text isn't even any different in nature, like the difference between an original oil painting and a print of the same. It's ultimately just a means to communicate ideas from my mind to yours. Perhaps it is ethical to disclose the use of generative AI, but I'm not convinced that would be any better in the minds of the reviewers in question here. I just don't see a substantiative difference if the end product ultimately is high quality. For what it's worth, I wasn't a great student (good at learning, yes, good at going through the motions to get good grades, not so much) and despite what some might call an academic approach to most problems I'm not really a fan of academia itself. There's a lot of stuffy old practices, like p-value being the metric for so many things despite the knowledge that it can be "hacked", and weird, unknowable financial or political motives that you'll never be privy to, which in my opinion compromise the integrity of the work more than use of generative AI does while also being harder to detect. I'm certainly not the first to point these issues and I won't be the one to solve it. I do wonder though if the whole thing is kinda broken, ChatGPT or not.

popalchemist 3y ago

Since one could ostensibly use ChatGPT to make the commits, this entire idea is moot. The paranoia we are seeing now will slowly fade. It doesn't make sense to adopt extreme measures, especially since the truthiness of any claim as to creative originality becomes more dubious with every day. Even if you hand-wrote and mailed a copy of your manuscripts one page at a time to the US Copyright Office, that would not suffice, since from the moment ChatGPT was made public, you could have been using it, then transfering your thoughts to paper. Just live your life.