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The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers

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Re: The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers

#51

Post by laserbeam »

minimaxir wrote: post #3

Legal question: if a writer loses a job due to a false accusal of using AI, would they win a damages lawsuit against the AI detector service if they can prove that AI content detection is knowingly imprecise? That's why those types of services (including OpenAI's initial AI detector) often have huge legal disclaimers saying not to take it as 100% accurate.

I'm not sure it would matter here. In my understanding, the victim was a freelance writer / contractor, not an employee. It kinds sux, but I don't think most job protection laws would apply here irrespective of AI involvement. Obviously this depends a lot on country / jurisdiction.

Re: The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers

#52

Post by raincole »

vijayr02 wrote: post #42
Buttons840 wrote: post #9

I want to see an "AI detector" that just marks everything as being not AI generated. Then, whenever someone is accused of using an AI by some nameless website, they can present their own website that shows they didn't use AI. Professor: "The website said you used an AI." Student: "Well, here's a website claiming I didn't use an AI." Professor: "I don't know if I believe that website, let's look into the merits of how…

Surely this is trivial to refute? The professor just needs to have his own text that he generated using AI. When your website says it's not AI... then it's curtains I guess?

The student just needs to find a pre-2022 article that is mistakenly marked as AI by the professor's detector.

It's harder but probably not that hard.

Re: The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers

#53

Post by neilv »

> Desperate, Michael even reached out to the company providing the AI test. To no avail. They simply told him he should set up an account with them, buy himself some credits, and test his articles again himself. At the end of the day, nothing changed the fact that there was this all-encompassing metric being thrown at him saying: You are cheating.

Snake Oil Company: "This person's articles were probably -- to almost certainly -- AI-generated."

Crappy Client: "99% is very scientific and damning. Fire that plagiarizing writer."

Writer's Lawyer: "Sounds like libel with clear economic harm."

Writer: "Please, Snake Oil Company, you're ruining my career."

Snake Oil Company: "We know, and we don't care. Pay us some money, and who knows."

Writer's Lawyer: "Libel, with a side of protection racket."

Re: The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers

#54

Post by margalabargala »

kykeonaut wrote: post #40
jdiff wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. Oudewater offered fair scales. What this guy's talking about are still rigged scales, just oppositely rigged scales. The only reason nobody was ever found a witch there was because the underlying concepts were BS.

Isn't the underlying concept of AI detectors BS as well? You could say something like "We cannot guarantee beyond reasonable doubt that this content is AI generated". Which one could argue is also always true.

This is something that I suspect will get easier in the next couple years as AI research progresses. I could imagine some sort of reversal tool being made such that "given this output and these weights files, how likely is it that these weights produced this output with a reasonable input?"

I don't know, that might be incredibly difficult forever, or it might be something that someone has a breakthrough in and manages to do.

Perhaps it's only useful for particularly egregious examples, and wouldn't be able to detect an AI text that was subsequently edited. That would be fine. When I was a TA in college, we ran students' papers through a plagiarism detector, which would spit out some % number based on what it thought was the amount/likelihood of plagiarism. The number itself was bunk, but across a class of 30 people, if one or two papers had much higher numbers than the other 28, I could click and look at it's justification. Sometimes it was a meaningless false positive, other times it was "here are the paragraphs that were copied verbatim from Wikipedia".

Re: The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers

#55

Post by gizmo686 »

Analemma_ wrote: post #30
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #10

Surely this is defamation? If I write a program to defame someone, is that still defamation?

Nope, not even close (at least in the United States). It varies a little by state, but in general defamation requires making either knowingly false statements, or having a malicious disregard for the truth, combined with intent to harm. An AI detection generator that gets a wrong answer meets neither of those requirements. You could potentially sue your employer or anyone else who took action on the false report, but…

Public figures need to prove "actual malice" [0]. If you are a private figure, you need only show negligence.

[0] Actual malice itself is a term of art. It does not require malice in the normal sense. Just a reckless disregard for the truth.

Re: The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers

#56

Post by mezentius »

"This absolute horror scenario is what happened to writer Michael Berben (not his real name)."

Absolutely didn't happen. You might occasionally credit a story in the NYT or WSJ using an anonymous source—but when one appears in a blog by a "serial entrepreneur active in the content industry," flogging a subscription product aimed at exactly the sort of marginally-employed writer targeted by the story, I would expect the average HN user to be slightly more critical of the claim.

Re: The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers

#57

Post by raincole »

mezentius wrote: post #56

"This absolute horror scenario is what happened to writer Michael Berben (not his real name)." Absolutely didn't happen. You might occasionally credit a story in the NYT or WSJ using an anonymous source—but when one appears in a blog by a "serial entrepreneur active in the content industry," flogging a subscription product aimed at exactly the sort of marginally-employed writer targeted by the story, I would expect t…

It would be top irony if this story were AI generated.

Re: The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers

#58

Post by actionfromafar »

simonw wrote: post #46

There's a key sentence hidden right at the end of this article: > They were terrified of Google downranking any AI-generated content, and because of the apparently clear results from their AI checker, they couldn’t be convinced otherwise. It sounds to me like the client might even have believed the evidence that he provided them showing that he didn't use AI to write the work... ... but they're in the SEO game, and t…

This pattern has precedent.

I scan releases with a bunch of Anti-Virus software. Not to find any virus, of course, but if one of the scanning softwares "detects" a virus, some customer is also going to "detect" the virus, and we have a problem.

Re: The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers

#59

Post by RationalDino »

Let's turn around and look at this from the company's point of view, rather than the freelancer's.

The company is looking for text that ranks well on Google SEO. That is what the writer is asked to create. The company has cause to fear that anything that looks even remotely AI generated will be flagged and penalized by Google. Google does this regularly, is a black box, and regularly destroys companies when they do it it.

The company has found out that this guy's writing looks enough like AI that detectors aren't sure that he is human. They fear that where one detector is uncertain, Google may assume AI. Therefore the company has reason to believe that this guy is no longer able to do what they pay him for - producing text that will rank well on Google SEO.

Nothing that the freelancer is doing addresses that. The freelancer wants to prove that he's human. The company never doubted that. But their knowledge won't help them if Google's SEO rules change. His job is to provide text that will rank well on SEO. He isn't succeeding.

The freelancer tries to convince the AI detection tool that they are rating him badly. But the value that they are providing here really isn't, "Are you human." It is, "Is this content potentially going to be flagged by Google's search algorithm in the future?"

Yes, the next generation of LLMs will beat the tools. But that's just the next iteration of a cat and mouse game that's been going on ever since content farms figured out how to manipulate PageRank, and Google decided to penalize the behavior. And the rule of that game is that you focus on what you think will happen in THIS iteration.

Yeah, it really sucks for the freelancer. But the company is probably making the right business decision here.

Re: The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers

#60

Post by caesil »

mezentius wrote: post #56

"This absolute horror scenario is what happened to writer Michael Berben (not his real name)." Absolutely didn't happen. You might occasionally credit a story in the NYT or WSJ using an anonymous source—but when one appears in a blog by a "serial entrepreneur active in the content industry," flogging a subscription product aimed at exactly the sort of marginally-employed writer targeted by the story, I would expect t…

"AI text detectors" are complete and utter bullshit rife with egregious false positives, so if they are actually used to cut ties with any writer based on such allegations, there is a near-certain chance that many or most such writers are actually innocent.

This might be a bias-confirming fake anecdote, for sure. But the effect is real.

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