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AI Detectors Get It Wrong. Writers Are Being Fired Anyway

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Re: AI Detectors Get It Wrong. Writers Are Being Fired Anyway

#31

Startup idea: online text editor that logs every keystroke and blockchains a hash of all logs every day. If you're accused of AI use, you can pull up the whole painstaking writing process and prove it's real.

> online text editor that logs every keystroke and blockchains a hash of all logs

Do you really think it would help? The kind of people who believe an "AI detector" works will just ignore your complicated attempts to prove otherwise; it's the word of your complex system (which requires manual analysis) against the word of the "AI detector" (a simple system in which you just have to press a button and it says "guilty" or "not guilty").

The more complicated you make your system (and adding a blockchain makes it even more complicated!), and the more it needs human judgment (someone has to review the keystrokes, to make sure it's not the writer manually retyping the output of a LLM), the less it will be believed.

Re: AI Detectors Get It Wrong. Writers Are Being Fired Anyway

#32

In some cases an AI will make a weird word choice. So do a lot of humans. Sometimes AIs are needlessly wordy. Um...so are a lot of humans. Rinse and repeat. AI detectors are useless. The AIs are training on human writing, so they write fundamentally like humans. How is this not obvious?

Precisely. And they way to get better writing is by having good editors.

The major newspapers and magazines used to have good editors and proofreaders and it used to be rare to see misspellings or awkward sentences, but those editors have been seriously cut back and you see these much more commonly.

But hey, let’s blame something else.

Re: AI Detectors Get It Wrong. Writers Are Being Fired Anyway

#33
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Shit. Let me try this again...

On the plus side, once humanity completely loses faith in the perceived value of AI, we will no doubt (I hope) wake up and realize the value of true human connection--unplug ourselves from this awful beast, and begin to rediscover what it means to be human.

Re: AI Detectors Get It Wrong. Writers Are Being Fired Anyway

#34

Startup idea: online text editor that logs every keystroke and blockchains a hash of all logs every day. If you're accused of AI use, you can pull up the whole painstaking writing process and prove it's real.

The blockchain part is silly, because timestamping services exist without it https://www.sectigo.com/resource-library/time-stamping-serve...

The rest is silly, because you can emulate the whole writing process by combining backtracking https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05426 and a rewriting/rewording loop.

With not much effort we can make LLM output look incredibly painstaking.

Re: AI Detectors Get It Wrong. Writers Are Being Fired Anyway

#35

In some cases an AI will make a weird word choice. So do a lot of humans. Sometimes AIs are needlessly wordy. Um...so are a lot of humans. Rinse and repeat. AI detectors are useless. The AIs are training on human writing, so they write fundamentally like humans. How is this not obvious?

Precisely, it's a tech that aims to write the most average, most likely human text.

Conceptually it seems like the average of all human texts would be distinct from any users because it would blend word choices and idioms across regions, where most of us are trained and reinforced in a particular region.

Other statistical anomalies probably exist; it is certainly possible to tell that an average is from a larger or smaller sample size (if I tell you X fair coin flips came up heads 75% of the time, you can likely guess X, and can tell that X is almost certainly less than 1000).

But in practice it doesn’t look possible, or at least the current offerings seem no better than snake oil.

Re: AI Detectors Get It Wrong. Writers Are Being Fired Anyway

#36

That's all we needed! They created systems that explicitly mimic the human writing, so now they want to detect people using that tool. In any way the AI system is always right and the human is wrong. It is a completely crazy system.

I think these are different theys.

Re: AI Detectors Get It Wrong. Writers Are Being Fired Anyway

#37
This is the dawn of a "post non-narrative prose" era. Why bother with an article describing some event or really anything that is traditionally written about in any form of article at all? In time, just the data will be released and your favorite LLM prepared with your favorite reading style will provide the mustard for your data, making it consumable. The journalism industry has failed in their mission, and nobody that should trust it trusts it anymore. Articles are simply what someone else wants you to think.

Re: AI Detectors Get It Wrong. Writers Are Being Fired Anyway

#38

In some cases an AI will make a weird word choice. So do a lot of humans. Sometimes AIs are needlessly wordy. Um...so are a lot of humans. Rinse and repeat. AI detectors are useless. The AIs are training on human writing, so they write fundamentally like humans. How is this not obvious?

Honestly, I could care less if an author uses AI as long as I can understand what I'm reading and it's interesting. They still have to instruct the AI.

Re: AI Detectors Get It Wrong. Writers Are Being Fired Anyway

#39

In some cases an AI will make a weird word choice. So do a lot of humans. Sometimes AIs are needlessly wordy. Um...so are a lot of humans. Rinse and repeat. AI detectors are useless. The AIs are training on human writing, so they write fundamentally like humans. How is this not obvious?

[deleted]

Re: AI Detectors Get It Wrong. Writers Are Being Fired Anyway

#40

Startup idea: online text editor that logs every keystroke and blockchains a hash of all logs every day. If you're accused of AI use, you can pull up the whole painstaking writing process and prove it's real.

That's a dehumanizing system. Have we lost our way, HN? Are we so immersed in the bleakness of tech, it comes so naturally for us, to propose "hey, let's create surveillance machines to perpetually watch people working, for the rest of their productive lives" and it's something we have to pause and think about?

Let's not build Hell on Earth for whatever reason it momentarily seems to make business sense.

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