Comment on OpenAI confirms that AI writing detectors don’t work

• Theharpyeagle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  See Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). Basically, making new AI detectors will always be harder than beating current ones. AI detectors have to somehow find a new “tell”, the target AI need only train itself on the output of the detector to figure out how to trick it.

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  • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    ChatGPT isn’t a GAN network.

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• dack@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  At a very high level, training is something like:

  • generate some output
  • give the output a score based on how much it looks like real human text
  • adjust the parameters slightly to improve the score
  • repeat

  Step #2 is also exactly what an “AI detector” does. If someone is able to write code that reliably distinguishes between AI and human text, then AI developers would plug it in to that training step in order to improve their AI.

  In other words, if some theoretical machine perfectly “knows” the difference between generated and human text, then the same machine can also be used to make text that is indistinguishable from human text.

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  • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Exactly right, I mentioned this in a comment elsewhere but basically we can’t have our cake and eat it too.

    We can’t have a perfect NL impersonator that can also be detected as not NL. (Best case, obviously things are perfect for any AI model so technically detecting those mistakes could be used to help identify perhaps, but who’s to say what the FP rate would look like!)

    Ultimately the cat is out of the bag and I’m not quite sure there is anything we can do now. Ultimately some smart fingerprinting solution would be ideal but I just don’t know how feasible that would remain.

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