OpenAI confirms that AI writing detectors don’t work

Be me

well-constructed human writing

You guys?! 🤗

I need a lotta help, just not from a friend and about anything robot-related 😮‍💨

Because you're training a detector on something that is designed to emulate regular languages closest possible, and human speech has so much incredible variability that it's almost impossible to identify if someone or something has been written by an AI.

You can detect maybe your typical generic chat GPT type outputs, but you can characterize a conversation with chat GPT or any of the other much better local models (privacy and control are aspects which make them better) and after doing that you can get radically human seeming outputs that are totally different from anything chat GPT will output.

In short, given a static block of text it's going to be nearly impossible to detect if it's coming from an AI. It's just too difficult to problem, and if you're going to solve it it's going to be immediately obsolete the next time someone fine tunes their own model

Because AIs are (partly) trained by making AI detectors. If an AI can be distinguished from a natural intelligence, it's not good enough at emulating intelligence. If an AI detector can reliably distinguish AI from humans, the AI companies will use that detector to train their next AI.

Because generative Neural Networks always have some random noise. Read more about it here

As I understand it as a layman who uses GPT4 quite a lot to generate code and formulas, it doesn't understand logic at all. Afaik, there is currently no rational process which considers whether what it's about to say makes sense and is correct.

It just sort of bullshits it's way to an answer based on whether words seem likely according to its model.

That's why you can point it in the right direction and it will sometimes appear to apply reasoning and correct itself. But you can just as easily point it in the wrong direction and it will do that just as confidently too.

GPT is a tool that the students will have access to their entire professional lives. It should be treated as such and worked into the curriculum.

Forbidding it would be like saying you can’t use Photoshop in a photography class.

Even in college? I never had a college course that allowed you to work on assignments in class

Who reads cover letters? At most they are skimmed over.

Looks like they got that number from this quote from another arstechnica article ”…OpenAI admitted that its AI Classifier was not "fully reliable," correctly identifying only 26 percent of AI-written text as "likely AI-written" and incorrectly labeling human-written works 9 percent of the time”

Seems like it mostly wasn’t confident enough to make a judgement, but 26% it correctly detected ai text and 9% incorrectly identified human text as ai text. It doesn’t tell us how often it labeled AI text as human text or how often it was just unsure.

EDIT: this article https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/07/openai-discontinues-its-ai-writing-detector-due-to-low-rate-of-accuracy/

Specificity vs sensitivity, no?

That may have been the goal. Look how good our AI is, even we can't tell if its output is human generated or not.

Typically for generative AI. I think during their training of the Nobel, they must have developed another model that detect if GPT produce a more natural language. I think that other model may reached the point where it couldn't flag it with acceptable false positive.

As an AI language model, I am unable to confirm whether or not the above post was written by an AI.

It's literally a marketing blog posted by OpenAI on their site, not a study in a journal.

OpenAI hasn't been focused on the science since the Microsoft investment. A science focused company doesn't release a technical report that doesn't contain any of the specs of the model they're reporting on.

Few decades ago probably, nowadays "scientists" make a lot of bs claims to get published. I was in the room when a "scientist" publishing several nature per year asked to her student to write a paper for a research without any result in a way that it looked like it had something important for a relatively good IF publication.

That day I decided I was done with academia. I had seen enough.

People like to view the problem as a paradox - can an all powerful God create a rock they cannot lift? - but I feel that's too generous, it's more marking your own homework.

If a system can both write text, and detect whether it or another system wrote that text, then "all" it needs to do is change that text to be outside of the bounds of detection. That is to say, it just needs to convince itself.

I'm not wanting to imply that that is easy, because it isn't, but it's a very different thing to convincing someone else, especially a human, that understands the topic.

There is also a false narrative involved here, that we need an AI to detect AI which again serves as a marketing benefit to OpenAI.

We don't, because they aren't that good, at least, not yet anyway.

Chatgpt 3.5 is free. Can't get more student priced than that.

Yeah, my point was I don't think there are many offering the service for free. And they are probably looking for revenue streams.

Suppose you ignore students running their own LLMs offline on their gaming gpus

I actually feel like this is the one that shouldn't be ignored. But I don't have a good sense of the computational power vs quality output.

It's still wildly impractical because students can paraphrase LLM output into something that doesn't look like the original output.

At least doing that is likely to result in the student internalizing the information to some degree. It's also not so different (not at all different?) from the most benign academic dishonesty that existed when I was a student.

One issue with the approach I suggested is the copyright issue of profs submitting students' original work for AI processing without understanding/caring about copyright implications.

Could you please provide a brief overview? This article is not available in my country/region.

Maybe it should keep a log of what was generated? Would that even work though?