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OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy

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Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy

#131

I'm glad that they did, although they should obviously done an announcement for it. The amount of people in the ecosystem who thinks it's even possible to detect if something is AI written or not when it's just a couple of sentences is staggering high. And somehow, people in power seems to put their faith in some of these tools that guarantee a certain amount of truthfulness when in reality it's impossible they could…

They could certainly keep a database of things generated by /their/ AI ...

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy

#133
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitpick: ChatGPR is supposed to write in a way that is indistinguishable from a human, to another human. That doesn't mean that it can't be distguishable by some other means.

Precisely -- watermarks are an obvious example of this. To me, this is THE path forward for AI content detection.

Watermarking text can't work 100% and will have false negatives and false positives. It is worse than nothing in many situations. It is nice when the stakes are low, but when you really need it you can't rely on it.

Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the post going around about how it can (and does) falsely flag human posts as AI output, particularly among some autistic people. About as useful as a polygraph, no?

TBH, a properly-administered polygraph is probably more accurate than OpenAI's detector (of course, "properly administered" requires the subject to be cooperative and answer very simple yes or no questions, because a poly measures subconscious anxiety, not "truth")

Polygraph is pseudo-science, it measures nothing.

Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy

#135
post #118

Good. And I think watermarking AI output is also a dead end. Better that we simply assume that all content is fake unless proven otherwise. To the extent that we need trustworthy photos, it seems like a better idea to cryptographically sign images at the hardware level when the photo is taken. Voluntarily watermarking AI content is completely pointless.

Cryptography cant save us here, people will figure out how to send AI images to the crypto hardware to get it signed in months. Just would be another similar layer of false security.

> Cryptography cant save us here, people will figure out how to send AI images to the crypto hardware to get it signed in months.

Possibly (who am I kidding. *PROBABLY*!) will use chatGPT to help them design the method :)

Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy

#136
post #118

Good. And I think watermarking AI output is also a dead end. Better that we simply assume that all content is fake unless proven otherwise. To the extent that we need trustworthy photos, it seems like a better idea to cryptographically sign images at the hardware level when the photo is taken. Voluntarily watermarking AI content is completely pointless.

Cryptography cant save us here, people will figure out how to send AI images to the crypto hardware to get it signed in months. Just would be another similar layer of false security.

That's not how cryptographic signing works.

Cryptographic signing means "I wrote this" or "I created this". Sure you could sign an AI generated image as yourself. But you could not sign an image as being created by Getty or NYT

Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both false-positives are as useful as the other one, flagged "human" but actually "LLM" vs flagged "LLM" but actually "human". As long as no one put too much weight on the result, no harm would have been done, in either case. But clearly, people can't stay away from jumping to conclusions based on what a simple-but-incorrect tool says.

Flagged "human" but actually "LLM" is not a false positive, but a false negative.

It depends how the question is framed: are you asking to confirm humanity, or confirm LLM.

If you are asking, is this LLM text Human generated, and it says Human (yes), then it is false positive.

If you are asking is this LLM generated text LLM generated, and is says and it says Human (no), then it is a false negative.

Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy

#138
Smart of OpenAI to shut down a tool that basically doesn't work before the school year starts and students start to get in trouble based on it.

I think this upcoming school year is going to be a wakeup call for many educators. ChatGPT with GPT-4 is already capable of getting mostly A's on Harvard essay assignments - the best analysis I have seen is this one:

https://www.slowboring.com/p/chatgpt-goes-to-harvard

I'm not sure what instructors will do. Detecting AI-written essays seems technologically intractable, without cooperation from the AI providers, who don't seem too eager to prioritize watermarking functionality when there is so much competition. In the short term, it will probably just be fairly easy to cheat and get a good grade in this sort of class.

Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH, a properly-administered polygraph is probably more accurate than OpenAI's detector (of course, "properly administered" requires the subject to be cooperative and answer very simple yes or no questions, because a poly measures subconscious anxiety, not "truth")

Polygraph is pseudo-science, it measures nothing.

I mean, it literally and factually measures multiple your body's autonomous responses - all of which are provably correlated with stress. That's what a polygraph machine is. Saying it measures nothing is factually incorrect.

You can't detect "truth" from that, but you can often tell (i.e. with better accuracy than chance) whether or not a subject is able to give a confident, uncomplicated yes-or-no to a straightforward question in a situation where they don't have to be particularly nervous (which is why it's not very useful for interrogating a stressed criminal suspect, and should absolutely be inadmissible in court).

But everyone knows that it's not very reliable in almost every circumstance it's used. My point is that while only marginally better than chance, it's still better than chance, unlike the OpenAI's detector, which is significant worse than chance.

Re: OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy

#140
The only way to prevent AI from answering questions in digital platforms is to develop a ML db on the typing style of every student across their tenure at an institution. Good luck getting that approved — departments can't even access grade or demo data without a steering group going through a 3-deep committee process.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ try paper I guess. Time to brush up on our OCR.

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