3 ms·

Having good heuristics is a valuable life skill. Presence of standard punctuation is not a good heuristic.

by buu700 1y ago

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.
        SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
        I think the heuristics are stupid, but happen to work with the current round of LLMs. The next round of training will work to stop the heuristics working, since if they work it means the LLM isn't correctly guessing the next token a human would produce. I don't think LLMs will become indistinguishable from humans any time soon, but I think it'll be a very long back & forth of training & finding new heuristics.
        the_af 1y ago
        > I think the heuristics are stupid, but happen to work with the current round of LLMs. This goes back to the initial comment you objected to: "if it works, it's not stupid". I don't think anybody here is arguing they will work forever, or that they won't influence the next generation of LLMs.
the_af 1y ago
This seems like begging the question to me. Why do you think it's not a good heuristic to be able to quickly spot the tell-tale signs of LLM involvement, before you've wasted time reading slop? Yes, there will be false positives. It's a heuristic after all.
- buu700 1y ago
  Because the false positive rate is unacceptably high — we're talking about a standard, widely used character — and because if the heuristic becomes widespread enough to matter, then it will be trivially circumvented by bad actors anyway. Who is it helping if we collectively bully ourselves into excising a perfectly good punctuation mark from human language? If anything, I'd rather that renderers like Markdown just all agree to change " - " to an en dash and " -- " to an em dash. Then we could put the matter to bed once and for all.
  - lmm 1y ago
    > the false positive rate is unacceptably high — we're talking about a standard, widely used character Citation needed. > Who is it helping if we collectively bully ourselves into excising a perfectly good punctuation mark from human language? Humans can adapt faster than LLM companies, at least for the moment. We need to be willing to play to our strengths. Who is it helping if we bully ourselves into ignoring a simple, easy "tell"?
    - buu700 1y ago
      Citation needed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash Humans can adapt faster than LLM companies No one said anything about LLM companies. If I were a spammer today, I'd just have my code replace dashes in LLM output with hyphens before posting it. As a human, I'm not going to suddenly stop using dashes because a handful of people are treating a silly meme as if it were a genuinely useful heuristic.
      - lmm 1y ago
rsynnott 1y ago
Honestly it is currently _good enough_. It's obviously imperfect, like ~all heuristics, but its false positive rate should be fairly low.
- buu700 1y ago
  "Should be fairly low" isn't a safe assumption without robust data to back that up. I think it's more likely to be unacceptably high. Dashes are standard punctuation marks available through Android/iOS/macOS keyboards, and automatically inserted into text by common tools like Microsoft Word — not some obscure Unicode character. What's next, are we going to start flagging any text that ends in a question mark as "AI-generated"?

Having good heuristics is a valuable life skill. Presence of standard punctuation is not a good heuristic.

by 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.
      - SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
        I think the heuristics are stupid, but happen to work with the current round of LLMs. The next round of training will work to stop the heuristics working, since if they work it means the LLM isn't correctly guessing the next token a human would produce. I don't think LLMs will become indistinguishable from humans any time soon, but I think it'll be a very long back & forth of training & finding new heuristics.
        the_af 1y ago
        > I think the heuristics are stupid, but happen to work with the current round of LLMs. This goes back to the initial comment you objected to: "if it works, it's not stupid". I don't think anybody here is arguing they will work forever, or that they won't influence the next generation of LLMs.

the_af 1y ago

This seems like begging the question to me. Why do you think it's not a good heuristic to be able to quickly spot the tell-tale signs of LLM involvement, before you've wasted time reading slop? Yes, there will be false positives. It's a heuristic after all.

buu700 1y ago
Because the false positive rate is unacceptably high — we're talking about a standard, widely used character — and because if the heuristic becomes widespread enough to matter, then it will be trivially circumvented by bad actors anyway. Who is it helping if we collectively bully ourselves into excising a perfectly good punctuation mark from human language? If anything, I'd rather that renderers like Markdown just all agree to change " - " to an en dash and " -- " to an em dash. Then we could put the matter to bed once and for all.
- lmm 1y ago
  > the false positive rate is unacceptably high — we're talking about a standard, widely used character Citation needed. > Who is it helping if we collectively bully ourselves into excising a perfectly good punctuation mark from human language? Humans can adapt faster than LLM companies, at least for the moment. We need to be willing to play to our strengths. Who is it helping if we bully ourselves into ignoring a simple, easy "tell"?
  - buu700 1y ago
    Citation needed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash Humans can adapt faster than LLM companies No one said anything about LLM companies. If I were a spammer today, I'd just have my code replace dashes in LLM output with hyphens before posting it. As a human, I'm not going to suddenly stop using dashes because a handful of people are treating a silly meme as if it were a genuinely useful heuristic.
    - lmm 1y ago

rsynnott 1y ago

Honestly it is currently _good enough_. It's obviously imperfect, like ~all heuristics, but its false positive rate should be fairly low.

buu700 1y ago
"Should be fairly low" isn't a safe assumption without robust data to back that up. I think it's more likely to be unacceptably high. Dashes are standard punctuation marks available through Android/iOS/macOS keyboards, and automatically inserted into text by common tools like Microsoft Word — not some obscure Unicode character. What's next, are we going to start flagging any text that ends in a question mark as "AI-generated"?