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

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

#121

Post by wongarsu »

alpinisme wrote: post #97
__loam wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If students what to deprive themselves of the opportunity to learn then that's their perogative.

Yes but this only further waters down the already watered down legitimacy of a degree. I know a lot of people think students should be building things independently of classes but that kind of misses the point of dedicating a full time investment in guided learning at the hands of an expert instructor. If instructors graded rigorously and had a magic cheating detection too (where cheating is defined overly capaciousl…

If the expert instructor guiding you doesn't know whether you actually understood the material, chances are they can replaced with a YouTube video.

If universities offer a learning environment that actually provides the students better learning than what they can get at home, the pieces of paper they hand out will continue to mean something. If they don't, they were already on a downward spiral kicked loose by online learning platforms handing out certificates.

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

#122

Post by nonrandomstring »

minimaxir wrote: post #3

Legal question: if a writer loses a job due to a false accusal of using AI, would they win a damages lawsuit against the AI detector service if they can prove that AI content detection is knowingly imprecise? That's why those types of services (including OpenAI's initial AI detector) often have huge legal disclaimers saying not to take it as 100% accurate.

For those interested in just how corrupt the relation between completely bogus "science" and unregulated "industry" can become, check out the ADE 651 [0]

In 2016 a British company, Advanced Tactical Security And Communications (ATSC), started selling dowsing rods, basically made from old coat-hangers and an empty box as "long range explosive detectors".

From Wikipedia:

    """ The device has been sold to 20 countries in the Middle East
    and Asia, including Iraq and Afghanistan, for as much as US$60,000
    each. The Iraqi government is said to have spent £52 million on
    the devices """"
It's almost certain that serving personnel were killed while relying on the fake devices to detect IEDs. ATSC founder was convicted of fraud and sentenced to ten years in jail.

It's no surprise that the "AI detection" racket is going to be a field day for every hoaxer and huckster. But companies like Turnitin have long been selling "black-box" snake-oil "Plagiarism detectors" that have blighted higher education, ruined millions of student's lives, and created thousands of make-work hours for professors.

Really though, it's our fault that we keep treating technology as magic, failing to exercise radical scepticism and robustly challenge the low quality products pedalled by tech companies.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651

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

#123

Post by notShabu »

__loam wrote: post #91
notShabu wrote: post #79

"better calculators will destroy humanity" seems like a ridiculous statement but that's what new AI tools that can create good art/music/writing does. They boil down and automate the middle process of calculation. what was previously "creative" is revealed as calculation from the God/Universe pov and as the range of calculable things grows, the island of im-a-real-human-bc-creativity gets smaller and smaller defined…

What a bleak way to think about creative work. AI is just brute forcing it by looking at millions of training examples. Talking about it like it knows some fundamental truth about creativity misunderstands what it does. At best it's an approximation and at worst it removes what was special from the inputs. > creativity ends up including some interesting domains like capital allocation and hedge fund management. I hat…

You're projecting a bit I think... the comment is making a case for the dehumanizing aspect of AI when it blurs the line between calculation and creativity

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

#124

Post by dragonwriter »

forgotuzrnmeee wrote: post #113

Weird choice to not disclose the writer in question. Would be very interested to see their articles and judge for myself if they were letting AI do a lot of cleanup on what they were writing. 200 articles in 3 years of journalism seems very prolific. Can anyone speak to whats normal for a career journalist?

> 200 articles in 3 years of journalism seems very prolific.

It's about four articles every three weeks. Doesn't seem extreme.

https://dublininquirer.com/2020/02/26/sam-how-many-articles-...

“Twenty years ago, in my first full-time job working for a daily newspaper, there was a period when I was turning out two or three articles a day – and I thought that was an unsustainably high number.

Today, young journalists have told me they’re asked to produce several times that.”

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

#125

Post by hotnfresh »

Loughla wrote: post #88
gunshai wrote: post #84

Pretty sure we are going to see a rise in the use of Oral Exams. The teachers that don't want to use them will continue to churn out students that score high and don't know how to articulate a damn thing. Which may have been the status quo anyway. Edit: I didn't like my original post

I was one of the students who could nail the exams and assignments I turned in, but then I BOMBED oral exams. Because of crippling anxiety. So how do you account for that? Or autism? Or any other sort of neurological disability?

The older I get the more convinced I am that a core skill schools should teach—started from early grade school—is speaking. Reading is probably the single most important skill, period, but—and I write this as someone with a bias toward writing—I think speaking is more important than writing, for most people. Not that learning to write doesn't teach skills relevant to speaking! Not that we should stop teaching writing! But I think getting over that kind of anxiety is exactly the kind of thing that every school ought to teach, and I think if the only way to accomplish that were to sacrifice some writing instruction, it'd be worth it.

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

#126

Post by slingnow »

Loughla wrote: post #88
gunshai wrote: post #84

Pretty sure we are going to see a rise in the use of Oral Exams. The teachers that don't want to use them will continue to churn out students that score high and don't know how to articulate a damn thing. Which may have been the status quo anyway. Edit: I didn't like my original post

I was one of the students who could nail the exams and assignments I turned in, but then I BOMBED oral exams. Because of crippling anxiety. So how do you account for that? Or autism? Or any other sort of neurological disability?

What about students who are currently failing the written exams due to their neurological disabilities? How are you accounting for that? These students would excel in an oral exam.

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

#127

Post by heavyarms »

Ignoring the obvious issue that this whole anonymous story seems suspiciously perfect for selling a related product...

On the one hand... Companies spent the past couple of decades engaging in various SEO hacks to rank high on search results and OpenAI scraped the internet to train a language model. Theoretically, it seems possible that some of the SEO techniques at least partially colored the flavor of LLM-generated text, and an "AI detector" could pick that up. So if you do a great job writing SEO optimized text (wordy, structured, lots of repeated key words, etc.) you are more likely to be flagged.

But really.. "AI Detector" services are snake oil and will lead to the creation of "Anti AI Detector" services that offer protective spells against the original snake oil. See, we eliminate a bunch of jobs with AI but we create whole new disciplines of work that didn't exist before. "AI Generated Content Obfuscation Specialist - III - W2" coming to a job board near you soon.

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

#128

Post by jupp0r »

dumbfounder wrote: post #19
jupp0r wrote: 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?

It said in the article that they were afraid that google would downrank them for having AI generated content.

Thanks for pointing that out, I don't think their premise is correct on that one, though: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/02/google-sea...

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

#129

Post by simonw »

jupp0r wrote: post #128
dumbfounder wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It said in the article that they were afraid that google would downrank them for having AI generated content.

Thanks for pointing that out, I don't think their premise is correct on that one, though: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/02/google-sea...

Sadly, SEO is 90% superstition.

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

#130

Post by wongarsu »

lacoolj wrote: post #110
simonw wrote: post #46

There's a key sentence hidden right at the end of this article: > They were terrified of Google downranking any AI-generated content, and because of the apparently clear results from their AI checker, they couldn’t be convinced otherwise. It sounds to me like the client might even have believed the evidence that he provided them showing that he didn't use AI to write the work... ... but they're in the SEO game, and t…

Doesn't this mean Google has an AI-detector that is somehow accurately finding these? Otherwise the majority of its index would be falsely flagged. What do they use?

Microsoft is probably the best placed company to build a good detection method, having both a giant corpus of text predating LLMs from their Bing crawler, and a giant corpus of AI-generated text thanks to their relationship to OpenAI.

But Google is probably a close second, with an even bigger archive of pre-LLM text (including the world's largest collection of digitized books), and supposedly a good LLM and lots of smart ML engineers.

But no matter what method google finds, whether it's some complex AI trained on massive amounts of training data or a simple n-gram analysis that ends up being telling, they aren't going to tell us. That would just accelerate the arms-race between LLM spam and LLM detection. If they have something that works (big if) the details will stay hidden, the best we are going to get is some kind of press release aimed at dissuading people from using AI on their websites.

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