I keep seeing posts about this kind of thing getting people’s hopes up, so let’s address this myth.

What’s an “AI detector”?

We’re talking about these tools that advertise the ability to accurately detect things like deep-fake videos or text generated by LLMs (like ChatGPT), etc. We are NOT talking about pro-active watermarking that companies like OpenAI might choose to willingly add in the future.

What does “effective” mean?

I mean something with high levels of accuracy, both highly sensitive (low false positives) and highly specific (low false negatives). High would probably be at least 95%, though this is ultimately subjective.

Why should the accuracy bar be so high? Isn’t anything better than a coin flip good enough?

If you’re going to definitively label something as “fake” or “real”, you better be damn sure about it, because the consequences for being wrong with that label are even worse than having no label at all. You’re either telling people that they should trust something they might have been skeptical about otherwise, or you’re slandering something real. In both cases you’re spreading misinformation which is worse than if you had said just “I’m not sure”.

Why can’t a good AI detector be built?

To understand this part you need to understand a little bit about how these neural networks are created in the first place. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a strategy often employed to train models that generates content. These work by having two different neural networks, one that generates content similar to existing content, and one that detects the difference between generated content and the existing content. These networks learn in tandem, each time one network gets better the other one also gets better.

That this means is that building a content generator and a fake content detector are effectively two different sides of the same coin. Improvements to one can almost always be translated directly and in an automated way into improvements into the other one. This means that the generator will always improve until the detector is fooled about 50% of the time.

Why do these “AI detectors” keep getting advertised if they don’t work?

  1. People are afraid of being saturated by fake content, and the media is taking advantage of that fear to sell snake oil
  2. Every generator network comes with its own free detector network that doesn’t really work all that well (~50% accuracy) because it was used to create the generator originally, so these detectors are ubiquitous among AI labs. That means the people that own the detectors are the SAME PEOPLE that created the problem in the first place, and they want to make sure you come back to them for the solution as well.