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"No, I swear I wrote this."

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Re: "No, I swear I wrote this."

#12

A human should not have to or be compelled to prove to be human. The onus of proof here is the wrong way around, the premise fundamentally incorrect.

Plus somebody will create an AI-powered program to take in text and have it “perform” the writing process with keystrokes and mouse movements and all that.

Re: "No, I swear I wrote this."

#13
post #8

Trivial to simulate. Though I disagree that AI writing is impossible to differentiate from human prose, at least for now. It's still pretty obvious and still much worse than human prose (or, at least, much less interesting to read), though some are better than others, and I'm better able to spot writing from models I use regularly (Claude has a very distinctive style I can spot from a mile away, but that's true partl…

"It's still pretty obvious and still much worse than human prose"

You have no idea how many false positives and how many false negatives you have in your judgement. It is indeed impossible to differentiate between badly written human text and somewhat good written llm text.

Re: "No, I swear I wrote this."

#15

A human should not have to or be compelled to prove to be human. The onus of proof here is the wrong way around, the premise fundamentally incorrect.

> A human should not have to or be compelled to prove to be human. The onus of proof here is the wrong way around, the premise fundamentally incorrect.

Innocent until proven guilty is for a court.

Outside of a court, people use all sorts of heuristics to determine authenticity and trustworthiness. Since so few humans ever wrote like the way LLMs default to, it's not unreasonable to refuse serious engagement with a party exhibiting this.

Aside: Every time someone claims they have always written like this, I ask for a link to their writing dated pre-2022, and send both to all free LLM chatbots with the question "did the same writer write both these pieces".

I have not yet gotten a "likely", or even a "remotely likely". It's all been "extremely unlikely".

Re: "No, I swear I wrote this."

#16
Didn't Pangram claim to have a >99% success rate?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48667761

From their homepage:

> Detect AI-generated content with 99.98% accuracy.

Are they wrong?

Though I ran the numbers, and even with a 0.02% false positive rate, that works out to about 6000 students falsely accused every semester, per university.

Re: "No, I swear I wrote this."

#18
post #10
post #8

Trivial to simulate. Though I disagree that AI writing is impossible to differentiate from human prose, at least for now. It's still pretty obvious and still much worse than human prose (or, at least, much less interesting to read), though some are better than others, and I'm better able to spot writing from models I use regularly (Claude has a very distinctive style I can spot from a mile away, but that's true partl…

Depends on what’s being written, and who the audience is. Anything of any length would be hard to simulate in a way that would fool an author - writing has a certain flow to it. A cadence. The editing and restructuring, deleting of words, typos you don’t catch until some random reread, rephrasing of sections because you want to use the original phrasing later in the piece. Could you simulate something be typed? Trivi…

To add to this, one can’t ignore the relationship between signal and receiver. I’d imagine most people on HN have enough pre-LLM reading experience to have a decent sense of what was written by an LLM versus a human.

And as LLMs get better at producing human-like text, that same pre-LLM reading experience, which helps people tell the two apart, will become less and less common.

Re: "No, I swear I wrote this."

#19
post #8

Trivial to simulate. Though I disagree that AI writing is impossible to differentiate from human prose, at least for now. It's still pretty obvious and still much worse than human prose (or, at least, much less interesting to read), though some are better than others, and I'm better able to spot writing from models I use regularly (Claude has a very distinctive style I can spot from a mile away, but that's true partl…

"It's still pretty obvious and still much worse than human prose" You have no idea how many false positives and how many false negatives you have in your judgement. It is indeed impossible to differentiate between badly written human text and somewhat good written llm text.

> You have no idea how many false positives and how many false negatives you have in your judgement.

The default LLM style is pretty deterministic. "Not X, Not Y. Just Z", etc.

There are phrases and cadences which are very rare in human prose (I have noted, IRL, that those people who read very little, and only read when they have to (work docs, etc) are literally unable to tell that a piece of prose sounds like an LLM even when it has about 12 occurrences of "Not X. Just Y" or "Not X, Not Y. Just Z" in as many paragraphs.

Re: "No, I swear I wrote this."

#20
post #10
post #8

Trivial to simulate. Though I disagree that AI writing is impossible to differentiate from human prose, at least for now. It's still pretty obvious and still much worse than human prose (or, at least, much less interesting to read), though some are better than others, and I'm better able to spot writing from models I use regularly (Claude has a very distinctive style I can spot from a mile away, but that's true partl…

Depends on what’s being written, and who the audience is. Anything of any length would be hard to simulate in a way that would fool an author - writing has a certain flow to it. A cadence. The editing and restructuring, deleting of words, typos you don’t catch until some random reread, rephrasing of sections because you want to use the original phrasing later in the piece. Could you simulate something be typed? Trivi…

I think you could simulate something that passes a sniff test. A writer would probably spot implausibilities in the simulation if they paid attention, but then we're back to square one, because you can spot that something was written by an LLM after you've wasted your time reading it and realize that you've been led around in circles with superficial information and no coherent train of thought, but by then your time has already been wasted.
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