4 ms·

> Eventually, as models and their users both improve, we'll collectively realize that trying to reliably discriminate between AI and human writing is no differe

by lmm 1y ago

> Eventually, as models and their users both improve, we'll collectively realize that trying to reliably discriminate between AI and human writing is no different than reading tea leaves. We should judge content based on its intrinsic value, not its provenance. There are zillions of words produced every second, your time is the most valuable resource you have, and actually existing LLM output (as opposed to some theoretical perfect future) is almost always not worth reading. Like it or not (and personally I hate it), the ability to dismiss things that are not worth reading like a chicken sexer who's picked up a male is now one of the most valuable life skills.

buu700 1y ago
Putting aside the claim that "LLM output [...] is almost always not worth reading"[1], the whole issue here is that this supposed ability of determining whether or not content is AI-generated doesn't exist. Is it really a valuable life skill to decide whether or not you want to read something based solely on its density of em dashes? Of course there are cases where you can tell that some text is almost certainly LLM output, because it matches what ChatGPT might reply with to a basic prompt. You can also tell when a piece of writing is copied and pasted from Wikipedia, or a copy of a page of Google results. Would any of that somehow be more worth reading if the author posted a video of themselves carefully typing it up by hand? 1: You're assuming a specific type of output in a specific type of context. If LLM output were never worth reading, ChatGPT would have no users.
- lmm 1y ago
  > Is it really a valuable life skill to decide whether or not you want to read something based solely on its density of em dashes? Having good heuristics to make quick judgements is a valuable life skill. If you don't, you're going to get swamped. > Would any of that somehow be more worth reading if the author posted a video of themselves carefully typing it up by hand? No, but the volume of carefully hand-typed junk is more manageable. Compare with spam: Individually written marketing emails might be just as worthless as machine-generated mass mailings, but the latter is what's going to fill up your inbox if you can't filter it out. > If LLM output were never worth reading, ChatGPT would have no users. Only if all potential users were wise. Plenty of people waste their time and money in all sorts of ways.
  - buu700 1y ago
    Having good heuristics is a valuable life skill. Presence of standard punctuation is not a good heuristic.
    - lmm 1y ago
      If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.
      - SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
        If it's stupid and it works once, chances are it's stupid and you just got lucky.
        the_af 1y ago
        What if it's stupid, and it mostly works except in some corner cases and until the current paradigm changes yet again?
        SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
        Then it's stupid and you're going to have an inevitable failure. Hopefully without any expensive sounds, so don't put LLMs in charge of heavy machinery or medical devices.
        the_af 1y ago
        I think you misunderstood. What we're discussing is whether a set of heuristics to determine whether something is the output of a human or an LLM are "stupid", not whether we should put LLMs in charge of critical work. It's not the LLMs we're talking about, but the heuristics to detect them. The person you initially replied to claimed the heuristics (to detect LLMs) are not stupid if they are shown to work (by detecting LLMs). The person they were replying to claimed such heuristics were useless.
- the_af 1y ago
  > 1: You're assuming a specific type of output in a specific type of context. If LLM output were never worth reading, ChatGPT would have no users. I think nobody is upset about reading an LLM's output when they are directly interacting with a tool that produces such output, such as ChatGPT or Copilot. The problem is when they are reading/watching stuff in the wild and it suddenly becomes clear it was generated by AI rather than by another human being. Again, not in a context of "this pull request contains code generated by an LLM" (expected) but "this article or book was partly or completely generated by an LLM" (unexpected and likely unwanted).
  - buu700 1y ago
    Right, that's part of what I'm getting at. There are two primary cases when LLM output tends to be bad: 1. In the context of research/querying, when unverified information from its output is falsely passed off as verified information curated by a human author. There's a big difference between "ChatGPT or some blog claims X" and "the answer is X". 2. In the context of writing/communication, when it's used to stretch a small amount of information into a relatively large amount of text. There's a big difference between using an LLM to help revise or trim down your writing, or to have it put together a first draft based on a list of detailed bullet points, and expecting it to stretch one sentence into a whole essay of greater value than the original sentence. Those are basic misuses of the tool. It's like watching an old person try to use Google 20 years ago and concluding that search engines are slop and the only reliable way to find information is through the index of Encyclopedia Britannica.
- ffin 1y ago
  > this supposed ability of determining whether or not content is AI-generated doesn't exist. It seems like you’re just wrong here? Em dashes aside, the ‘style’ of llm generated text is pretty distinct, and is something many people are able to distinguish.
  - buu700 1y ago
    No, I'm not wrong. Someone could easily write in the default output style of ChatGPT by hand (which will probably become increasingly common the longer that style remains in place), and someone could easily collaborate with ChatGPT on writing that looks nothing like what you're thinking. If organizations like schools are going to rely on tools that claim to detect AI-generated text with a useful level of reliability, they better have zero false positives. But of course they can't, because unless the tool involves time travel that isn't possible. At best, such tools can detect non-ASCII punctuation marks and overly cliched/formulaic writing, neither of which is academic dishonesty.
    - ffin 1y ago
      Okay, you’re right that the LLM writing style isn’t singularly producible by LLM’s. However, I’m not sure why this writing style would become increasingly common? I don’t see why people would mimic text that is seen as low quality or associated with academic dishonesty. Additionally, I do think it is valuable to determine if a piece of text is valuable, or more precisely, what I’m looking for. As others have said, if I want info from a LLM about a subject, it is trivial for me to get that. Oftentimes I am looking for text written by people though.
      - buu700 1y ago
        However, I’m not sure why this writing style would become increasingly common? I was basing that on a few factors, off the top of my head: 1. Someone might pick up mannerisms while using LLMs to help learn a new language, similarly to how an old friend of mine from Germany spoke English with an Australian accent because of where she learned English. 2. Lonely or asocial people who spend too much time with LLMs might subconsciously pick up habits from them. 3. Generation Beta will never have known a world without LLMs. It's not that difficult to imagine that ChatGPT will be a major formative influence on many of them. As others have said, if I want info from a LLM about a subject, it is trivial for me to get that. Sure, it's trivial for anyone to look up a simple fact. It's not so trivial for you to spend an hour deep-diving into a subject with an LLM and manually fact-checking information it provides before eventually landing on an LLM-generated blurb that provides exactly the information you were looking for. It's also not trivial for you to reproduce the list of detailed hand-written bullet points that someone might have provided as source material for an LLM to generate a first draft.

by lmm 1y ago

buu700 1y ago

Putting aside the claim that "LLM output [...] is almost always not worth reading"[1], the whole issue here is that this supposed ability of determining whether or not content is AI-generated doesn't exist. Is it really a valuable life skill to decide whether or not you want to read something based solely on its density of em dashes? Of course there are cases where you can tell that some text is almost certainly LLM output, because it matches what ChatGPT might reply with to a basic prompt. You can also tell when a piece of writing is copied and pasted from Wikipedia, or a copy of a page of Google results. Would any of that somehow be more worth reading if the author posted a video of themselves carefully typing it up by hand? 1: You're assuming a specific type of output in a specific type of context. If LLM output were never worth reading, ChatGPT would have no users.

lmm 1y ago
> Is it really a valuable life skill to decide whether or not you want to read something based solely on its density of em dashes? Having good heuristics to make quick judgements is a valuable life skill. If you don't, you're going to get swamped. > Would any of that somehow be more worth reading if the author posted a video of themselves carefully typing it up by hand? No, but the volume of carefully hand-typed junk is more manageable. Compare with spam: Individually written marketing emails might be just as worthless as machine-generated mass mailings, but the latter is what's going to fill up your inbox if you can't filter it out. > If LLM output were never worth reading, ChatGPT would have no users. Only if all potential users were wise. Plenty of people waste their time and money in all sorts of ways.
- buu700 1y ago
  Having good heuristics is a valuable life skill. Presence of standard punctuation is not a good heuristic.
  - lmm 1y ago
    If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.
    - SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
      If it's stupid and it works once, chances are it's stupid and you just got lucky.
      - the_af 1y ago
        What if it's stupid, and it mostly works except in some corner cases and until the current paradigm changes yet again?
        SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
        Then it's stupid and you're going to have an inevitable failure. Hopefully without any expensive sounds, so don't put LLMs in charge of heavy machinery or medical devices.
        the_af 1y ago
        I think you misunderstood. What we're discussing is whether a set of heuristics to determine whether something is the output of a human or an LLM are "stupid", not whether we should put LLMs in charge of critical work. It's not the LLMs we're talking about, but the heuristics to detect them. The person you initially replied to claimed the heuristics (to detect LLMs) are not stupid if they are shown to work (by detecting LLMs). The person they were replying to claimed such heuristics were useless.
the_af 1y ago
> 1: You're assuming a specific type of output in a specific type of context. If LLM output were never worth reading, ChatGPT would have no users. I think nobody is upset about reading an LLM's output when they are directly interacting with a tool that produces such output, such as ChatGPT or Copilot. The problem is when they are reading/watching stuff in the wild and it suddenly becomes clear it was generated by AI rather than by another human being. Again, not in a context of "this pull request contains code generated by an LLM" (expected) but "this article or book was partly or completely generated by an LLM" (unexpected and likely unwanted).
- buu700 1y ago
  Right, that's part of what I'm getting at. There are two primary cases when LLM output tends to be bad: 1. In the context of research/querying, when unverified information from its output is falsely passed off as verified information curated by a human author. There's a big difference between "ChatGPT or some blog claims X" and "the answer is X". 2. In the context of writing/communication, when it's used to stretch a small amount of information into a relatively large amount of text. There's a big difference between using an LLM to help revise or trim down your writing, or to have it put together a first draft based on a list of detailed bullet points, and expecting it to stretch one sentence into a whole essay of greater value than the original sentence. Those are basic misuses of the tool. It's like watching an old person try to use Google 20 years ago and concluding that search engines are slop and the only reliable way to find information is through the index of Encyclopedia Britannica.
ffin 1y ago
> this supposed ability of determining whether or not content is AI-generated doesn't exist. It seems like you’re just wrong here? Em dashes aside, the ‘style’ of llm generated text is pretty distinct, and is something many people are able to distinguish.
- buu700 1y ago
  No, I'm not wrong. Someone could easily write in the default output style of ChatGPT by hand (which will probably become increasingly common the longer that style remains in place), and someone could easily collaborate with ChatGPT on writing that looks nothing like what you're thinking. If organizations like schools are going to rely on tools that claim to detect AI-generated text with a useful level of reliability, they better have zero false positives. But of course they can't, because unless the tool involves time travel that isn't possible. At best, such tools can detect non-ASCII punctuation marks and overly cliched/formulaic writing, neither of which is academic dishonesty.
  - ffin 1y ago
    Okay, you’re right that the LLM writing style isn’t singularly producible by LLM’s. However, I’m not sure why this writing style would become increasingly common? I don’t see why people would mimic text that is seen as low quality or associated with academic dishonesty. Additionally, I do think it is valuable to determine if a piece of text is valuable, or more precisely, what I’m looking for. As others have said, if I want info from a LLM about a subject, it is trivial for me to get that. Oftentimes I am looking for text written by people though.
    - buu700 1y ago
      However, I’m not sure why this writing style would become increasingly common? I was basing that on a few factors, off the top of my head: 1. Someone might pick up mannerisms while using LLMs to help learn a new language, similarly to how an old friend of mine from Germany spoke English with an Australian accent because of where she learned English. 2. Lonely or asocial people who spend too much time with LLMs might subconsciously pick up habits from them. 3. Generation Beta will never have known a world without LLMs. It's not that difficult to imagine that ChatGPT will be a major formative influence on many of them. As others have said, if I want info from a LLM about a subject, it is trivial for me to get that. Sure, it's trivial for anyone to look up a simple fact. It's not so trivial for you to spend an hour deep-diving into a subject with an LLM and manually fact-checking information it provides before eventually landing on an LLM-generated blurb that provides exactly the information you were looking for. It's also not trivial for you to reproduce the list of detailed hand-written bullet points that someone might have provided as source material for an LLM to generate a first draft.