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Proving a human wrote something

gjtorikian.online

51–60 of 88 posts

Re: Proving a human wrote something

#51

> 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?

No, still not worth reading. Do you have any ideas? Tell me about them. If you don't have any idea what it all really means and whether it's correct, then don't waste my time, whether or not an AI is involved.

Re: Proving a human wrote something

#52
post #20

"No information about your text is ever sent to the server, and there’s no way to identify the author based on the minted certificate" This means the certificate is independent of author and source text. There's nothing stopping you from sending fake counts/duration to the semoi server. It's a certificate that only says "at this point in time, this is the information I was provided with". You can then attach it to an…

> IOW: I predict we'll see a resurgence of reputation systems, to some extent

I think you're right that reputation systems are the best solution to a low signal-to-noise ratio.

Consumers (and the agents under their control) will increasingly prioritize content and other products with reliable attestation that they come from a trustworthy publisher, organization, brand, or individual.

Re: Proving a human wrote something

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, still not worth reading. Do you have any ideas? Tell me about them. If you don't have any idea what it all really means and whether it's correct, then don't waste my time , whether or not an AI is involved.

Right. But you'll never have a checker for that. How do you check for the overall idea being AI-shaped? It's a much deeper check than style, even typing patterns or anything like that. If I consult the chatbot, then memorize the overall arguments and ideas, and then record myself typing out an essay regurgitating it in my own words, how can you distinguish that from writing down my own ideas?

Re: Proving a human wrote something

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, still not worth reading. Do you have any ideas? Tell me about them. If you don't have any idea what it all really means and whether it's correct, then don't waste my time , whether or not an AI is involved.

Right. But you'll never have a checker for that. How do you check for the overall idea being AI-shaped? It's a much deeper check than style, even typing patterns or anything like that. If I consult the chatbot, then memorize the overall arguments and ideas, and then record myself typing out an essay regurgitating it in my own words, how can you distinguish that from writing down my own ideas?

Fundamentally, I don't actually care about whether AI wrote it or not. I care about whether the ideas are well-thought-out or half-baked. I care whether the writing is slop (whether AI or corporate PR or politician-speak or whatever), or whether the writing is actually something a human would want to read.

But as you say, we don't know how to write a checker for that...

Re: Proving a human wrote something

#55

> 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…

> is going to be short lived because someone will train an AI on a corpus of human keystrokes and get a replication

You can remotely attest the input devices. You can do it anonymously (long story, but doable) and without requiring some kind of pre-signed image for the while OS. (The OS passes through recent-input attestations.)

Re: Proving a human wrote something

#56

> 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?

I think this is a the GP’s point: the whole thing is a fool’s errand.

Re: Proving a human wrote something

#57

> 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?

Through the act of paraphrasing you will necessarily have to think about what words to choose and how to phrase it, which would likely be different from someone else performing the same task. So I can’t say if it makes it absolutely interesting (above some threshold that I would classify it as “interesting”), but relatively it would be more interesting than the AI output.

Re: Proving a human wrote something

#58

> 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…

> is going to be short lived because someone will train an AI on a corpus of human keystrokes and get a replication You can remotely attest the input devices. You can do it anonymously (long story, but doable) and without requiring some kind of pre-signed image for the while OS. (The OS passes through recent-input attestations.)

If it matters that much, and you still don't want to, just hire someone to type it in.

Re: Proving a human wrote something

#59
I had a similar idea for take-home tests for software interviews. Run a bash script to commit all changes in a repo every 5 seconds. The candidate then submits a tarball of the git repo.

  #!/usr/bin/env bash
  while true; do
    git add -A
    if ! git diff --cached --quiet; then
      git commit -m "$(date --iso-8601=seconds)"
    fi
    sleep 5
  done

Re: Proving a human wrote something

#60

Just like we trained on human language to create LLMs, we can train on human keystrokes with a similar algorithm and spit out believable (at least statistically) "human" keystrokes generated by machine.

Except quite oddly, virtually no one has collected precise keystroke information or if they have it certainly is not public. I genuinely wonder if such a dataset exists
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