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Ask HN: How would you build a ChatGPT detector?

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Ask HN: How would you build a ChatGPT detector?

#1
Like everyone else, I'm blown away by ChatGPT's responses to prompts. At the same time, there's a certain sameiness to the language it produces. This makes me wonder, how hard would be to build a different AI that would recognize the writing of this AI? And how accurate could it get?

Re: Ask HN: How would you build a ChatGPT detector?

#2
I'd argue it probably depends on the context, and what exactly you want to detect, and probably isn't a technical problem.

For example, if you prevent students from cheating, that's probably a problem specific to education. If you want to know whether a student's essay are their own words, you can ask them questions about their essay. You can have them verbally defend their arguments and research. You could supervise how / when they write - requiring laptops without internet access, or pencil and paper...

Re: Ask HN: How would you build a ChatGPT detector?

#3
I came across this[1] recently. I tested it on content that I used an GPT to help write. It does a good job detecting short content that wasn't "refined" much. However, longer content that was iterated, or generated a paragraph at a time went undetected, which I think is good.

[1] https://contentatscale.ai/ai-content-detector/

Re: Ask HN: How would you build a ChatGPT detector?

#4
I agree with the softwaredoug that this is probably not a technical problem.

Any proposed solution would only serve to make the next iteration of the model better at avoiding detection (e.g. incorporating a GAN-style training cycle).

Just as with Poe's law, there simply comes a point at which it becomes impossible to recognise AI generated texts just by analysing them. Made-up references might be a clue, but that's very context-dependent.

Re: Ask HN: How would you build a ChatGPT detector?

#8

This might provide some guidance: http://gltr.io/

This and related techniques are trivially foolable by fine-tuning the model.

They're also trivially foolable by using sampling techniques or settings which encourage the model to generate rare words a lot.

Also foolable with filter-assisted decoding: https://paperswithcode.com/paper/most-language-models-can-be...

Re: Ask HN: How would you build a ChatGPT detector?

#9
post #4

I agree with the softwaredoug that this is probably not a technical problem. Any proposed solution would only serve to make the next iteration of the model better at avoiding detection (e.g. incorporating a GAN-style training cycle). Just as with Poe's law, there simply comes a point at which it becomes impossible to recognise AI generated texts just by analysing them. Made-up references might be a clue, but that's v…

Right, but in principle the detectors could iterate and get better over time too. That's why I asked about "a ChatGPT detector" instead of "general AI detector", which is a very different problem.
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