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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

#71

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

bradley13 wrote: post #5

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?

In the general internet the reputation of AI writing is that it's writing that's bad/awkward in a way that is often identifiable (by humans) as not having been written by humans.

AI detectors are useless, you're right, but for the same reason AI is unreliable in other contexts, not because AI writing is reliably passable.

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

#72

Post by TeMPOraL »

emiliobumachar wrote: post #9

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.

Stupid startup killing idea: an open-source script that runs LLM in the background and streams its output as input events, so the idiotic keylogger thinks it's all written by hand.

Just writing this down here instantly invalidates the premise.

An overkill variant to rub salt in the wounds of duped investors: make the script control a finger bot on an X/Y harness, so it literally presses the physical keys of a physical keyboard according to LLM output.

Bonus points for making a Kickstarter out of it and getting some YouTubers to talk about it (even as a joke) - then sitting back to watch as some factories in China go brrrr, and dropshippers flood the market with your "solution" before your fundraising campaign even ends.

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

#73

Post by giancarlostoro »

immibis wrote: post #43
giancarlostoro wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're reading nonfiction, it means you're wasting time reading a lot more words when you could have just read the prompt.

In my case, I talk a lot, and write a TON, my use for AI is really "can you say the same information with less words" then I tweak what it gives me. To be fair, I'm not a paid writer, just a dev writing emails to business people. I rewrite emails like 20 times before sending them. ChatGPT has helped me to just write it once, and have it summarized. I usually keep confidential details out and add them in after if needed.

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

#75

Post by tivert »

coliveira wrote: post #16

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.

> It is a completely crazy system.

If you're not doing a better job than the best machine, you're stealing your wages from the capitalists.

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

#76

Post by mwigdahl »

HPsquared wrote: post #59
jeff_vader wrote: post #53

Reminds this current slightly comedic (IMO) situation in my office: a few months ago developers were given access to GitHub's "Copilot Enterprise". Then, a month or so later, organisation also adopted another "AI" product checking pull requests for risks associated with "use of generative AI". And needless to say it does occasionally fail code written without any "generative AI"..

Deeply ironic.

It's the best of both worlds! A new product to improve productivity, and then a whole new layer of process and analytics (powered by yet another product) to mitigate the risk and soak up the surplus. Everybody wins -- particularly the 3rd party consultants and product vendors!

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

#77

Post by conartist6 »

bsenftner wrote: post #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 t…

That's the spirit! Why bother? It's about "consumability". Once meaning and purpose are forever vanquished from life, imagine how happy we will all be drooling through our soulless data stream!

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

#78

Post by gravescale »

immibis wrote: post #43
giancarlostoro wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're reading nonfiction, it means you're wasting time reading a lot more words when you could have just read the prompt.

Indeed you can losslessly "compress" an LLM's spew into just the prompt (plus any other inputs like values of random variables).

But you can also compress a book's entire content into just its ISBN.

It's just that books are hopefully more than just statistical mashups of existing content (some books like textbooks and encyclopaedias are kinds of mashup, though one hopes the editors have more than a statistically-based critical input!)

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

#79

Post by CM30 »

the_af wrote: post #60

Regardless of whether AI detectors work or not, I worry we're reaching a new unfortunate era. While alarmists were worrying about alignment or evil AIs, the true downside of LLMs is turning out to be... AI spam. I've started seeing it everywhere: Q&A sites, forums, etc. In some places it's banned, but how do you reliably detect it? And what makes people post AI spam when there's no reward or money involved? What are…

In most cases, the answer is that they're trying to achieve the appearance of legitimacy, so that when they subtly (or not so subtly) start hawking whatever they're trying to sell, the site/community doesn't immediately flag them as a spammer/bot.

Kinda like why in the old days, you'd see comment spam with a lengthy but meaningless auto generated message to go with it.

Alternatively, it might be to sell said account to spammers later down the line, since said spammers want to buy social media accounts that have a bunch of legitimate activity associated with them.

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