Live data from Hacker News

The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers

authory.com

31–40 of 171 posts

Re: The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers

#31
post #14

Why even care? If the article is well written and well researched and it's seemingly impossible for readers to tell the difference, what's the problem with using AI to improve it? Did people care when computers were used instead of typewriters? When spell checkers became popular?

Mission Accomplished? https://xkcd.com/810/

Not quite, because we're only at the point where the bots makes comments with the veneer of being constructive or insightful.

Re: The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers

#32
post #2

These AI detectors have all the validity of phrenology. You can enter some of your own writing (I did) to easily see for yourself. The text I entered had been online, and still is online, longer than AI writers have been around - but that doesn't seem to feed into their logic.

Which text did you enter, and into which AI detector?

I tried it with my blog, and it was correctly identified by Copy Leaks as written by a human. I don't know how representative https://copyleaks.com/blog/ai-detector-continues-top-accurac... is, but certainly all of them are getting above phrenology detection rates.

Even with this guy, the problem wasn't that it misidentified him as AI. It was that "we can't tell" got turned into, "we can't risk Google thinking he might be AI".

Re: The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers

#34
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you want is a sort of AI Witches' Scales? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oudewater#Buildings

Not quite. Oudewater offered fair scales. What this guy's talking about are still rigged scales, just oppositely rigged scales. The only reason nobody was ever found a witch there was because the underlying concepts were BS.

You're not wrong.

I'm trying to think if you can indeed do something with a fair test.

Re: The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you want is a sort of AI Witches' Scales? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oudewater#Buildings

From the linked article: " After the weighing, they received an official certificate proclaiming them not a witch... Certificates would state that 'the body weight is in proportion to its build'. The reasoning behind this is the old belief that a witch has no soul and therefore weighs significantly less than an ordinary person". I love this piece of history so much, thank you for sharing it! Adding this one to my boo…

Which is obviously misguided. You can't determine from somebody's BMI if they have a soul. A soul only weighs three quarters of an ounce [1], or about 1/10th a cup of coffee. Well within even the daily variation of a person's body weight. (/s)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_grams_experiment

Re: The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers

#36
post #24

Are his articles included in a training set? Are they actually good content or should he try harder to behave like a human? This sounds like a defamation lawsuit. This seems like an issue NFTs could take some pressure of off.

> This seems like an issue NFTs could take some pressure of off.

A new game: Sarcasm or Crypto Poe's law?

I legitimately don't know if I'm laughing with or at the above poster - all I know is I'm laughing.

Re: The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers

#37
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mission Accomplished? https://xkcd.com/810/

Not quite, because we're only at the point where the bots makes comments with the veneer of being constructive or insightful.

But they're getting there!

Re: The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers

#39
post #8

Daydream: The names of companies firing people on the basis of "AI detector" results are reported to the IRS...which then uses an "AI detector" to discover whether they've been cheating on their taxes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/us/politics/irs-deploys-a...

Re: The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers

#40
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you want is a sort of AI Witches' Scales? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oudewater#Buildings

Not quite. Oudewater offered fair scales. What this guy's talking about are still rigged scales, just oppositely rigged scales. The only reason nobody was ever found a witch there was because the underlying concepts were BS.

Isn't the underlying concept of AI detectors BS as well? You could say something like "We cannot guarantee beyond reasonable doubt that this content is AI generated". Which one could argue is also always true.
Post reply on HN