Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apparently I am a robot

aiweirdness.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 52 posts

Re: Apparently I am a robot

#11

Post by maxbond »

ggm wrote: post #2

Yep. I've been accused of using ChatGPT to compose some of my posts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33930584#33930756

I'd like us all to try and reserve the accusation that someone is a bot until we really need it. I know this is probably pointless, like asking a fish not to swim, but if we water down this language (which is already happening & perhaps inevitable, I kinda think "bot" just means "person who expresses an opinion I don't like, that I've heard before, and feel is repetitive" in some circles - eg in this video [1] they say "bots can be people") we're going to have a harder time expressing ourselves when we need it.

I'm a language descriptivist, so I'm bound to accept whatever the language does, but darn, I do find this particular evolution frustrating.

[1] https://youtu.be/LEvfdBF19kQ

Re: Apparently I am a robot

#12

Post by ggm »

maxbond wrote: post #9
ggm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I say that the response I wrote about 7% compounding is categorically not GPT and I fail to see what about it, perhaps should I say "them" since I wrote two distinct responses could be held to be artificial writing. I truly expected it to be one of my more florid prose pieces. That was a minimally factual statement: 7% return on investment is astonishingly well documented, but under appreciated by people addicted…

I think if we ran the GPT2 spotting model against anyone's comment history we'd find a couple comments that scored really high. I doubt it's actually related to your writing style. Alternative hypothesis is that it's not about how you're writing but where. HN appears to have been used to train GPT3.5. I don't know if it was used to train GPT2, but it might have done. So your comments might be in the training set.

I already suspect my blog writings and standards work in IETF are, it wrote a pretty good CV covering letter/brief biography for me according to a relative (also a computer scientist) who tested it. He also noted it stuffed up his, claimed he'd written on work which was demonstrably untrue.

RFCs and associated mailing lists are pretty widely distributed and certainly RFCs aren't ring-fenced from GPT.

So if chatbot detectors are bad on people who are inputs to the ML can't that be added to the detector?

Re: Apparently I am a robot

#13

Post by maxbond »

ggm wrote: post #12
maxbond wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if we ran the GPT2 spotting model against anyone's comment history we'd find a couple comments that scored really high. I doubt it's actually related to your writing style. Alternative hypothesis is that it's not about how you're writing but where. HN appears to have been used to train GPT3.5. I don't know if it was used to train GPT2, but it might have done. So your comments might be in the training set.

I already suspect my blog writings and standards work in IETF are, it wrote a pretty good CV covering letter/brief biography for me according to a relative (also a computer scientist) who tested it. He also noted it stuffed up his, claimed he'd written on work which was demonstrably untrue. RFCs and associated mailing lists are pretty widely distributed and certainly RFCs aren't ring-fenced from GPT. So if chatbot de…

That's pretty cool. When I tried stuff like that, it was entirely based off of the prompt I gave it. I asked it to criticize my HN posts, and it came up with a story about how I was a charlatan; I asked it to summarize my views on Python exceptions in my HN posts, and it came up with a story about how I'm a world renowned Python expert. (I'm neither, but have written nothing noteworthy, so it's unsurprising.)

It could maybe be added to the detector but I think we're going to discover "did this output come from this model?" is ultimately undecidable. My intuition is that this is somehow equivalent to the halting problem, but that's a wild guess, and I'm not an AI researcher or computer scientist (just a humble SWE). Something like, if you start generating prompts that might take you to a part of latent space where this output could have been produced, you don't know when to stop generating longer and longer prompts.

Re: Apparently I am a robot

#14

Post by robocat »

wildpeaks wrote: post #10

This might become more and more of a pain for neurodivergents, we already sound "odd" enough as it is, now people will assume we're just chatbots.

Do you think that the writing of neurodivergents is likely to be more unique?

GPT generated text has a sort of cookie-cutter boring ”style” to it. Perhaps anyone actually familiar with the GPT “style” is less likely to think the writing of neurodivergents is generated? Hard to say, but probably not worth worrying about (if anxiety is another symptom then maybe no choice but to worry).

Re: Apparently I am a robot

#15

Post by maxbond »

wildpeaks wrote: post #10

This might become more and more of a pain for neurodivergents, we already sound "odd" enough as it is, now people will assume we're just chatbots.

I heard similar concerns expressed when the insurance company Lemonade, in since deleted & recanted tweets, said they were going to use AI to look for signs of deception in videos people submitted along with claims.

I only skimmed this article (I saw this on Twitter around the time it happened), doesn't appear to contain the deleted tweets, but it's discussed here https://www.vox.com/recode/22455140/lemonade-insurance-ai-tw...

Re: Apparently I am a robot

#16

Post by robocat »

ggm wrote: post #6
robocat wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a quick detect on some your older posts: found this one from a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27568715 with 65 tokens and 99.14% fake. A quick googling shows sentences to be unique. GPT2 released on February 2019, so it would be nice to find older examples than that. Of course, does the detector have problems when text from its training corpus is used? No idea. Maybe your brain is just closer to…

I think I've been subtly insulted again... fail the test, more closely aligned to the statistical model of an ideal GPT and using cliché. I plead guilty to all of them. I clearly took one for the team, let the side down, disappointed at the finish, peaked early and missed by a country mile. Try harder. Grow a backbone. (Hu)man up!

77 tokens, 88.25% fake. You are really good at this game!

And https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18576101 which you wrote 4 years ago (before GPT2) has: 79 tokens 99.86% Fake

Hopefully someone writes a script to run the detector over past users, because we are sure to find someone who naturally writes like GPT (after all, the training corpus came from somewhere!)

Also: no intent to insult - I would be even more amused to find myself detected as fake! I just love the topic - how much subliminal judgement to we make due to subtle word order choices? For example, how much more convincing could we be with some word or grammar changes?

After testing a heap of my own old comments using https://huggingface.co/openai-detector , I found one comment of mine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17216586 with 65 tokens and 68.92% Fake. I don’t think I write much like other people. I also didn’t get any “bold” matches from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 (edited)

Re: Apparently I am a robot

#17

Post by sdenton4 »

robocat wrote: post #14
wildpeaks wrote: post #10

This might become more and more of a pain for neurodivergents, we already sound "odd" enough as it is, now people will assume we're just chatbots.

Do you think that the writing of neurodivergents is likely to be more unique? GPT generated text has a sort of cookie-cutter boring ”style” to it. Perhaps anyone actually familiar with the GPT “style” is less likely to think the writing of neurodivergents is generated? Hard to say, but probably not worth worrying about (if anxiety is another symptom then maybe no choice but to worry).

Not sure about confusing neuro-divergent people with bots, but detecting abnormalities by text analysis has been around for a while. Famously, signs of Alzheimer's we're apparent in later Agatha Christie novels: https://www.npr.org/2010/06/01/127211884/agatha-christie-and...

Re: Apparently I am a robot

#18

Post by ggm »

maxbond wrote: post #11
ggm wrote: post #2

Yep. I've been accused of using ChatGPT to compose some of my posts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33930584#33930756

I'd like us all to try and reserve the accusation that someone is a bot until we really need it. I know this is probably pointless, like asking a fish not to swim, but if we water down this language (which is already happening & perhaps inevitable, I kinda think "bot" just means "person who expresses an opinion I don't like, that I've heard before, and feel is repetitive" in some circles - eg in this video [1] they s…

I tend to agree. So.. thus was somebody else running a chatbot detector against my writings here. Ie it was an accusation leveled AT me, not made BY me.

If your complaint is that I committed a solecism referring to GPT trained models which can be found by hunting on Google for "chatbot gpt" I plead expediency and guilty.

Re: Apparently I am a robot

#19

Post by ggm »

robocat wrote: post #16
ggm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I've been subtly insulted again... fail the test, more closely aligned to the statistical model of an ideal GPT and using cliché. I plead guilty to all of them. I clearly took one for the team, let the side down, disappointed at the finish, peaked early and missed by a country mile. Try harder. Grow a backbone. (Hu)man up!

77 tokens, 88.25% fake. You are really good at this game! And https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18576101 which you wrote 4 years ago (before GPT2) has: 79 tokens 99.86% Fake Hopefully someone writes a script to run the detector over past users, because we are sure to find someone who naturally writes like GPT (after all, the training corpus came from somewhere!) Also: no intent to insult - I would be even more amu…

What was the hit rate on your own response above? The quine...

Re: Apparently I am a robot

#20

Post by maxbond »

ggm wrote: post #18
maxbond wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like us all to try and reserve the accusation that someone is a bot until we really need it. I know this is probably pointless, like asking a fish not to swim, but if we water down this language (which is already happening & perhaps inevitable, I kinda think "bot" just means "person who expresses an opinion I don't like, that I've heard before, and feel is repetitive" in some circles - eg in this video [1] they s…

I tend to agree. So.. thus was somebody else running a chatbot detector against my writings here. Ie it was an accusation leveled AT me, not made BY me. If your complaint is that I committed a solecism referring to GPT trained models which can be found by hunting on Google for "chatbot gpt" I plead expediency and guilty.

I think we've misunderstood reach other, I wasn't criticizing you or anyone, I wanted to use your story to highlight a danger to everyone else that you've already experienced. I'm just shouting into the void that we shouldn't do something we're definitely gunnuh do, in the hopes that awareness will at least soften the blow.
Post reply on HN