this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
145 points (82.2% liked)

Technology

59578 readers
2917 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] TheGreenGolem@lemm.ee 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

It's mathematically impossible to detect them reliably. But I know you will know it better.

https://www.techspot.com/news/98031-reliable-detection-ai-generated-text-impossible-new-study.html

Edit: here is the actual study: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11156

[–] agent_flounder@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Here is the link in that article to The study

Regarding mathematical impossibility...

We then provide a theoretical impossibility result indicating that as language models become more sophisticated and better at emulating human text, the performance of even the best-possible detector decreases. For a sufficiently advanced language model seeking to imitate human text, even the best-possible detector may only perform marginally better than a random classifier. Our result is general enough to capture specific scenarios such as particular writing styles, clever prompt design, or text paraphrasing.

Interesting. Now, this is just one paper. And one paper does not mean the science is settled on that topic.

The implications are certainly interesting.

I'm curious how much data would be required to successfully mimic a specific writing style (e.g. lemmy post or research paper or letter to family) for a specific person. And conversely how easy it would be to detect.

I haven't thought about this in depth yet. But the threats that come to mind are: someone spoofing me for some reason or me using AI to "research" and write for me (school, say) so I don't actually have to learn anything. The former makes me wonder if digital signatures will become more widely adopted. The latter probably requires a different approach to assessing the knowledge of students. I'm sure there are other threats we can think of given a little more time.

[–] givesomefucks@lemmy.world -4 points 1 year ago

This is like someone disputing an article about the Wright Brothers first flight with one from 6 months earlier that says manned flight can't happen...