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

OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy

decrypt.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 292 posts

Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy

#31

Post by insanitybit »

BestGuess wrote: post #29
capableweb wrote: post #5

I'm glad that they did, although they should obviously done an announcement for it. The amount of people in the ecosystem who thinks it's even possible to detect if something is AI written or not when it's just a couple of sentences is staggering high. And somehow, people in power seems to put their faith in some of these tools that guarantee a certain amount of truthfulness when in reality it's impossible they could…

Taking away tools don't seem to me like the best response same way taking away things tends never to be. If the problem is people not using it right, that seems to me like it would be designed wrong for what people need it for. Like if the issue is using it wrong with too little sentences, then put a minimum sentence or something to have that minimum likelihood. Same goes for representing what it means. If people don…

The problem isn't people not using it right, the problem is that the tool can never work and just by being out in the world it would cause harm.

If I have a tool that returns a random number between 0 and 1, indicating confidence that text is AI generated, is that tool good? Is it ethical to release it? I'd say no, it isn't. Removing the option is far better because the tool itself is harmful.

Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy

#33

Post by michaelt »

nonethewiser wrote: post #19
merlincorey wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Invisible characters in a specific bit-pattern. Pretty common steganographic technique, really.

Can you elaborate on "invisible?" The only invisible character I can imagine is a space. It seems like any other character either isn't invisible or doesn't exist (ie, isnt a character). Additionally, if I copy-paste text like this are the invisible characters preserved? Are there a bunch of extra spaces somewhere?

When students try to evade plagiarism detectors, they will swap characters like replacing spaces with nonbreaking spaces, replacing letters with lookalikes (I vs extended Cyrillic Ӏ etc), and inserting things like the invisible 'Combining Grapheme Joiner'

IMHO it isn't a feasible way of watermarking text though - as someone would promptly come up with a website that undid such substitutions.

Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy

#34

Post by cjbgkagh »

BestGuess wrote: post #29
capableweb wrote: post #5

I'm glad that they did, although they should obviously done an announcement for it. The amount of people in the ecosystem who thinks it's even possible to detect if something is AI written or not when it's just a couple of sentences is staggering high. And somehow, people in power seems to put their faith in some of these tools that guarantee a certain amount of truthfulness when in reality it's impossible they could…

Taking away tools don't seem to me like the best response same way taking away things tends never to be. If the problem is people not using it right, that seems to me like it would be designed wrong for what people need it for. Like if the issue is using it wrong with too little sentences, then put a minimum sentence or something to have that minimum likelihood. Same goes for representing what it means. If people don…

There are numerous people that I’ve tried to get them comprehend statistics, important medical statistics for doctors so you would assume they’re smart enough to understand. There just seems to be a sufficient subset of the population that are blind to statistics and nothing can be done about it. Even sitting down and carefully going through the math with them doesn’t work. No matter how deep into visualization rabbit hole you go there will still be a subset that will not get it.

Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy

#35

Post by BestGuess »

insanitybit wrote: post #31
BestGuess wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking away tools don't seem to me like the best response same way taking away things tends never to be. If the problem is people not using it right, that seems to me like it would be designed wrong for what people need it for. Like if the issue is using it wrong with too little sentences, then put a minimum sentence or something to have that minimum likelihood. Same goes for representing what it means. If people don…

The problem isn't people not using it right, the problem is that the tool can never work and just by being out in the world it would cause harm. If I have a tool that returns a random number between 0 and 1, indicating confidence that text is AI generated, is that tool good? Is it ethical to release it? I'd say no, it isn't. Removing the option is far better because the tool itself is harmful.

I don't agree with that premise. I don't know that it can't work, that'd suggest something like no matter what it's worse than a coin flip. I don't think it's that bad or at least nobody showed me anything of it being that bad. You'd have to show me that it can't work and that seems to me a pretty big ask I know

Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy

#36

Post by frumper »

capableweb wrote: post #11
catboybotnet wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the post going around about how it can (and does) falsely flag human posts as AI output, particularly among some autistic people. About as useful as a polygraph, no?

Both false-positives are as useful as the other one, flagged "human" but actually "LLM" vs flagged "LLM" but actually "human". As long as no one put too much weight on the result, no harm would have been done, in either case. But clearly, people can't stay away from jumping to conclusions based on what a simple-but-incorrect tool says.

A tool that gives incorrect and inconsistent results shouldn’t have any part of a decision making process. There is no way to know when it’s wrong so you’ll either use it to help justify what you want, or ignore it.

Edit: this tool is as reliable as a magic 8-ball

Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy

#37

Post by practice9 »

chakintosh wrote: post #21

This tool's been fueling tons of false accusations in academia. Wife is doing her PhD and she often tells me stories about professors falsely accusing students of using ChatGPT.

Lots of stories on Reddit about school teachers unfairly accusing students of using ChatGPT for assignments too

Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy

#38

Post by insanitybit »

BestGuess wrote: post #35
insanitybit wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't people not using it right, the problem is that the tool can never work and just by being out in the world it would cause harm. If I have a tool that returns a random number between 0 and 1, indicating confidence that text is AI generated, is that tool good? Is it ethical to release it? I'd say no, it isn't. Removing the option is far better because the tool itself is harmful.

I don't agree with that premise. I don't know that it can't work, that'd suggest something like no matter what it's worse than a coin flip. I don't think it's that bad or at least nobody showed me anything of it being that bad. You'd have to show me that it can't work and that seems to me a pretty big ask I know

All that has to be shown is that the tool is as bad as or worse than random today, in order to remove it today.

Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy

#39

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

hef19898 wrote: post #25
catboybotnet wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the post going around about how it can (and does) falsely flag human posts as AI output, particularly among some autistic people. About as useful as a polygraph, no?

We could combine those, couldn't we?

Some kind of Voigt-Kampff Test, perhaps.

Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy

#40

Post by BestGuess »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #34
BestGuess wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking away tools don't seem to me like the best response same way taking away things tends never to be. If the problem is people not using it right, that seems to me like it would be designed wrong for what people need it for. Like if the issue is using it wrong with too little sentences, then put a minimum sentence or something to have that minimum likelihood. Same goes for representing what it means. If people don…

There are numerous people that I’ve tried to get them comprehend statistics, important medical statistics for doctors so you would assume they’re smart enough to understand. There just seems to be a sufficient subset of the population that are blind to statistics and nothing can be done about it. Even sitting down and carefully going through the math with them doesn’t work. No matter how deep into visualization rabbi…

Alright let's say that's how it is. How happy would everyone else be if they were treated like that even if they weren't like that? I'd be right miffed and I ain't no einstein. My problem is saying it's a good thing to *remove* options just because some people don't know how to use it. Use that kinda logic for other stuff and you'd paint yourself in a corner with a very angry hornet trapped in it, so not the kind of thing you want to encourage if you assume you'd end up the one trapped. I don't know if my message is comin across right do you get me?
Post reply on HN