Ask HN: How can we reliably determine if text was written by AI?

I dont think you can. If you know who “wrote” it though, you might be able to detect it if its drastically different in tone than what they have written in the past (but even then it might have been ghost written)

It might be a more tractable question to ask whether the author could have written the text, focusing on evaluating the _author_

You might imagine, for example, in an academic context combining an in-person Q&A. Or other non-text modalities that currently still are hard to fake.

(In an academic context, people are pretty stupid with their low-effort prompting and copy-pasting, at least when people finely tune their prompt and writing, its a bit of work and thought)

This would make for a fun quiz game. Show some text that was written by AI or written before 2022 and see how many you can get right. Actually maybe I’ve seen this somewhere…?