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OpenAI confirms that AI writing detectors don’t work
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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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.
I’m not sure I’m following your argument here - you keep switching between talking about AI and AI detectors. Each of the below are just numbered according to the order of your prior responses as sentences:
I’m having trouble finding your support for your claim
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.
ChatGPT isn’t a GAN network.
At a very high level, training is something like:
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.
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 arent 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.
Edit: source: I took a few 600 level ai classes in college and have made several of my own of varying types and what not