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Proving a human wrote something

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Re: Proving a human wrote something

#41

Post by bobbiechen »

gnarlouse wrote: post #38

i do actually think the general thrust of the idea is good. i also think it's sort of inherently cursed, and has some amount of a predeterminable fate. if it doesnt take off, it dies. if it does take off and becomes a relevant currency of some sort, it will need improving. if it needs improving how far are we willing to go? does some alternative system fork off to handle severity of provenance concern? what happens w…

Here's another similar project: https://writetrack.dev/

There's plenty of microbehavioral analysis we can do that is initially effective but will get bypassed (with GANs being the purest way, or something more domain-specific).

You could imagine a livestream that's permanently published somewhere. But the verification of the livestream takes longer than reading the piece itself (and is itself vulnerable to faking).

Personally I think it comes back to something like writing under your real name - staking your reputation - as the most trustworthy indicator. At least people in your circles can trust you.

Re: Proving a human wrote something

#42

Post by verdverm »

I used to live with a ghostwriter for Simon Sinek, she was never attributed or acknowledged in "his" books. Since Ai authorship has become a common topic, I've wondered how the two means of producing a book relate and how it might inform this debate.

Re: Proving a human wrote something

#43

Post by naet »

I think we are reaching a point where some kind of solid attestation that things are not AI generated would be very valuable, for all kinds of different media (printed word, photo, video, etc).

I'm not sure how you would actually do any of that attestation, if it's even possible. Text seems especially difficult. Maybe photo/video could be achieved with specialized hardware and cryptographic signing though I don't know much about either so I'm not sure how it would work. Maybe all that attestation would also tie in to some kind of universal personal identifier online, so that bad actors can be tracked or excluded and can't repeatedly spin up new accounts.

It might mean a big reduction in privacy for certain online spaces that opt in to such a system... but the alternative of all trust being eroded and voices drowned out by a sea of bots or generated content seems potentially worse.

Re: Proving a human wrote something

#45

Post by mattm »

alexpotato wrote: post #23

> “I didn’t think anyone would care” prevented me from writing, though A few years ago I started writing Twitter threads [0]. A few weeks ago I passed 200 total threads. When I started writing them, my thought process was: "Is anyone going to be interested in my stories/ideas??" Dear HN comment reader, I can 100% assure you of two things: 1. If you write things, at least one person will read them. 2. It is VERY hard…

I recall a similar quote from Elton John that I'll paraphrase:

"I've had a lot of hits so you'd think I'd know in advance which ones will become hits. Songs that I was sure would become hits went nowhere and some songs that I didn't think anything of became my biggest hits"

It's been a long time since I heard this so I'm probably mangling it. A quick search shows that he probably did say something like this though https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/showbiz-tv/sir-elton-j...

The lesson is - just put it out there and see what happens

Re: Proving a human wrote something

#46

Post by jerf »

bobbiechen wrote: post #41
gnarlouse wrote: post #38

i do actually think the general thrust of the idea is good. i also think it's sort of inherently cursed, and has some amount of a predeterminable fate. if it doesnt take off, it dies. if it does take off and becomes a relevant currency of some sort, it will need improving. if it needs improving how far are we willing to go? does some alternative system fork off to handle severity of provenance concern? what happens w…

Here's another similar project: https://writetrack.dev/ There's plenty of microbehavioral analysis we can do that is initially effective but will get bypassed (with GANs being the purest way, or something more domain-specific). You could imagine a livestream that's permanently published somewhere. But the verification of the livestream takes longer than reading the piece itself (and is itself vulnerable to faking). P…

You can read ahead as to how this would go by looking at the CAPTCHA world, which unbeknownst to a lot of people left behind "click this image" as the actual test a long time ago and does a lot of behavioral analysis of mouse motions and stuff. Which is itself a constant arms race. Which I would still characterize as "advantage attacker" with regard to that aspect of it, CAPTCHAs still have at least some utility more from the other streams they have access to that are harder to fake, e.g., "this IP address is from a rentable service space and thus more likely to be a bot" sorts of checks.

Re: Proving a human wrote something

#47

Post by VeryFinePrint »

AI detection has gotten a lot better recently, and I've found that Pangram is "good enough" for a lot of use cases. A lot of people are uncomfortable with opaque detection methods, but waiting for a perfect solution (if such a solution even exists) will cause communication channels to be filled with bad actors who turn your community/platform/etc... into something resembling LinkedIn.

Re: Proving a human wrote something

#48

Post by bonoboTP »

ninjagoo wrote: post #40

> how do you prove a human wrote something? Forget about the why or the value in it, just: how? > Semoi is a plugin (currently only available for Obsidian) which tracks the length of time it took for a document to be written up Trying to mechanistically prove that a human created some content as opposed to ai, in the age of LLMs and style transfer when you can just ask for something to be written in the style of Mark…

Ok so what if I just rephrase the essay that the LLM gave me, while keeping all the overall message and ideas and arguments, just slightly rewritten in my own words, but without having any idea about what it all really means and whether it's correct. Is that something worth reading now, but the LLM output is not worth reading?

Re: Proving a human wrote something

#49

Post by Mike-Kelner »

carodgers wrote: post #10

Even before LLMs, proving that a specific human wrote some piece of text was difficult or imprecise due to coauthoring, editing, plagiarism, etc. The important question then, as now, is rather to determine whether a specific human approved some piece of text for publication under their name.

This is what puzzles me about the whole topic as well. Why do we need to treat AI texts as anything special? As long as there is a name next to the text, we should care about the message instead of the way it was written. It reminds me of the situation with political ads, when after the main part of a commercial we hear: "I'm John Doe and I approve this message." It doesn't matter who wrote the script of the commercial - John Doe confirms that it is his position, and that is what matters most.

For example, English is not my native language. I can speak, read, write - I have no issue using it for work or everyday life. My own kid only speaks English. But when we talk about writing an article, I would want to polish it. I would want to put my thoughts into a better form, so people may enjoy reading a well-written text which may have some fragments written or edited by AI so it will be simply better. I would use it for additional fact-check. Communication is not a competition in language skills.

I once heard a story told by a journalist. He used to write articles for the NYT from time to time, and the process was like this: he knows English, but the NYT asked him to write in his native language, a very experienced translator produced the English text, and then they polished it together with the editors. Once the article was published, it mentioned only his name — no mentions of editors or translators. Why? Because creating a text is not just writing or typing. Often it is a more complicated process which may or may not include other people or systems. What matters most is whether the author puts their signature at the end or not.

Re: Proving a human wrote something

#50

Post by AnimalMuppet »

Mike-Kelner wrote: post #49
carodgers wrote: post #10

Even before LLMs, proving that a specific human wrote some piece of text was difficult or imprecise due to coauthoring, editing, plagiarism, etc. The important question then, as now, is rather to determine whether a specific human approved some piece of text for publication under their name.

This is what puzzles me about the whole topic as well. Why do we need to treat AI texts as anything special? As long as there is a name next to the text, we should care about the message instead of the way it was written. It reminds me of the situation with political ads, when after the main part of a commercial we hear: "I'm John Doe and I approve this message." It doesn't matter who wrote the script of the commerci…

This means that we must hold humans responsible for every stupid thing they say, whether or not AI told it to them. And in fact, that's the road we should have been on from day one. "Computers do not lie" is an idea that should have died in the 1970s.
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