_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Artificial Writing and Automated Detection [pdf]
xtiansimon wrote 4 hours 45 min ago:
Slightly off-topic. A client uses Stripe for a small business website.
We got an automated email saying a transaction was flagged as
potentially fraudulent. We should investigate and possibly refund
before a chargeback occurs. What? Is this a stolen card or what?
So I inquired with the chatbot and they list possible causes of a
flagged transaction could be stolen card, as well as a few other
examples which amount to a mix of service issues which are
customer-determined. But the bot says itâs definitely not a
chargeback. What?
So now I contact support. They say itâs a flag from the credit card
issuing bank. Wait. What? Is this a fraudulent stolen card or not?
Still no. Itâs just a warning based on pattern usage. Why you passing
this slop to my client? If there is a pattern problem, the flag should
go to the customer who authorizes the charge. Otherwise itâs a
chargeback or known stolen card.
They say, well, you can contact the customer. What? If the pattern is
actually a stolen card, which is listed as a possible cause of the flag
while not saying it is or isnât, then they can just lie!
Which is a lot to say this pattern matching for fraud or negative
patterns suffers from idiocy, even in the simplest of contexts.
vesterthacker wrote 17 hours 5 min ago:
The paper Artificial Writing and Automated Detection by Brian Jabarian
and Alex Imas examines the strange boundary that now divides human
expression from mechanical imitation. Within their analysis one feels
not only the logic of research but the deeper unease of our age, the
question of whether language still belongs to those who think or only
to those who simulate thought. They weigh false positives and false
negatives, yet behind those terms lives an older struggle, the human
desire to prove its own reality in a world of imitation.
I read their work and sense the same anxiety in myself. When I write
with care, when I choose words that carry rhythm and reason, I feel
suspicion rather than understanding. Readers ask whether a machine has
written the text. I lower my tone, I break the structure, I remove what
once gave meaning to style, only to make the words appear more human.
In doing so, I betray something essential, not in the language but in
myself.
The authors speak of false positives, of systems that mistake human
writing for artificial output. But that error already spreads beyond
algorithms. It enters conversation, education, and the smallest corners
of daily life. A clear sentence now sounds inhuman; a careless one,
sincere. Truth begins to look artificial, and confusion passes for
honesty.
I recall the warning of Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt in The Deliberate
Dumbing Down of America. She foresaw a culture that would teach
obedience in place of thought. That warning now feels less like
prophecy and more like description.
When people begin to distrust eloquence, when they scorn precision as
vanity and mistake simplicity for virtue, they turn against their own
mind. And when a society grows ashamed of clear language, it prepares
its own silence. Not the silence of peace, but the silence of
forgetfulness, the kind that falls when no one believes in the power of
words any longer.
Jacobee wrote 15 hours 11 min ago:
I saw what you did:
"yet behind those terms lives an older struggle, the human desire to
prove its own reality in a world of imitation."
..each paragraph ends with this corny and tiresome 50's mechanized
`erudite' baloney.
--The Rod Serling Algo, aka, TTZ
foxfired wrote 19 hours 3 min ago:
There was a post just a few hours ago on the frontpage asking not to
use AI for writing [0]. I copied the content and pasted it on multiple
"AI detection" tools. It scored from 0% and to up to 80%. This is not
gonna cut it. As someone who used LLMs to "improve" my writing, after a
while, no matter the prompt, you will find the exact same patterns.
"Here's the kicker" or "here is the most disturbing part" those
expressions and many more come up no matter how your engineer the
prompt. But here's the kicker, real people also use these expressions,
just at a lesser rate.
Detection is not what is going to solve the problem. We need to go back
and reevaluate why we are asking students to write in the first place.
And how we can still achieve the goal of teaching even when these
modern tools are one click away.
[0]:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45722069
TomasBM wrote 9 hours 44 min ago:
I see what you did there.
I think we'll still need ways to detect copy-pasted zero-shot content
that's generated by LLMs, for the same reasons that teachers needed
ways to detect plagiarism. Kids, students, and interns [1] "cheat"
for various different reasons [2], and we want to be able to detect
lazy infractions early enough so that we can correct their behavior.
This leads to three outcomes:
1. Those that never really meant to cheat will learn how to do things
properly.
2. Those that cheated out of laziness will begrudgingly need to weigh
their options, at which point doing things properly may be less
effort.
3. Those that meant to cheat will have to invest (much) more effort,
and run the risk of being kicked-out if they're rediscovered.
[1] But also employees, employers, government officials, etc.
[2] There could be some relatively benign reasons. For example, they
could: not know how to quote/reference others properly; think it's OK
because "everyone does it" or they don't care about subjects that
involve writing; do it "just this once" out of procrastination; and
similar.
dpoloncsak wrote 3 hours 17 min ago:
The whole argument is "A written response to an answer is no longer
a valid form of testing for knowledge"
We don't need better detection. We need better ways to measure
one's grasp of a concept. When calculators were integrated into
education, the focus shifted from working the problem out, to using
the correct formulas and using the calculator effectively. Sure,
elementary classes will force you to 'show your work', but that's
to build the foundation to build on, I believe.
We don't need to detect plagiarism if we're asking students verbal
answers, for example
mmooss wrote 11 hours 29 min ago:
One major missing piece in using AIs is self-expression. The idea of
writing is to express your own ideas, to put yourself on the page;
someone writing for you, AI or biological, can't do that. There are
far too many nuances and subtleties.
I suspect many students write to pass the class, and AI can do that.
Perhaps the problem is the incentives to write that way.
binarymax wrote 22 hours 37 min ago:
My two cents about this after working with some teachers: this is a cat
and mouse game and you're wasting your time trying to catch students
writing essays on their own time.
It is better to pivot and not care about the actual content of the
essay, but instead seek alternate strategies to encourage learning -
such as an oral presentation or a quiz on the knowledge. In the
laziest case, just only accept hand-written output - because even if it
was generated at least they retained some knowledge by copying it.
globalnode wrote 18 hours 25 min ago:
Why do we even grade people? Just teach the content and be done with
it. Sure if a student wants to assess their knowledge to see how well
they can answer questions they can do that for kicks. If industry
wants well educated people, they should have supervised entrance
quizes or exams, the onus is on them. This obsession with catching
cheaters is out of control.
TomasBM wrote 9 hours 23 min ago:
If you're asking this seriously:
We need to grade people because that's the best way we have to
determine (for one or more subjects) who's:
1. capable enough, so that we can promote them to the next stage;
2. improving or has potential for improvement, so that we can give
them the tools or motivation to continue;
3. underperforming, so that we can find out why and help them turn
it around (or reduce the pressure);
4. actually learning the content, and if not, why not.
Thankfully, everyone knows this system is flawed, so most don't put
too much weight on school grades. But overall, the grades are there
to provide both an incentive for teachers and students to do
better, and a way to compare performance.
globalnode wrote 8 hours 56 min ago:
All good points, and I was sort of coming at it from the point of
view of catching cheaters. ofc cheaters skew the data but theyre
ultimately hurting themselves. They wont pass a companies'
entrance tests or will soon find themselves unemployed if they
cant do the work. Yes its a problem but I see a lot of effort
being spent on trying to detect them. Is that effort proportional
to the problem?
NewsaHackO wrote 21 hours 25 min ago:
I think the most realistic way is to do a flipped classroom, where
middle-school and beyond, children are expected to be independent
learners. Class time should be spent on application of skills and
evaluation.
laptopdev wrote 22 hours 2 min ago:
If computer usage hampers a child's socialization with the group he's
learning with, maybe the simplest and most meaningful solution would
be preventing children enrolled in language comprehension classes
from having access to computers at home particularly at core language
and reasoning stages in development.
nonethewiser wrote 22 hours 34 min ago:
Do teachers prefer grading papers or something? This always seemed
like the obvious answer and there are no shortage of complaints.
There is something making papers "sticky" that I do not understand.
Education needs to be agile enough to change it's assessment methods.
It's getting to the point where we can't just blame LLMs anymore.
Figure out how to asses learning outcomes instead of just insisting
on methods that you assumed should work.
burkaman wrote 20 hours 38 min ago:
Oral exams and quizzes are hard for reasons unrelated to
understanding the subject matter. Language barriers, public
speaking anxiety, exam stress, etc. All things that students should
hopefully learn how to overcome, but that's a lot to ask a teacher
to deal with in addition to teaching history or whatever. With a
paper, a student can choose their own working environment, choose a
day and time when they are best able to focus, have a constructive
discussion with the teacher if they're having trouble midway
through the work, and spread their effort (if they want to) across
more than an hour-long test or 5-minute oral exam. In an imaginary
world where they couldn't cheat, a paper gives the teacher the best
chance of evaluating whether a student understands the material.
I don't think you're wrong necessarily, but there are good reasons
that teachers like papers other than "we've always used them".
mmooss wrote 11 hours 32 min ago:
> Oral exams and quizzes are hard for reasons unrelated to
understanding the subject matter. Language barriers, public
speaking anxiety, exam stress, etc
People have some different challenges writing papers and taking
oral and written quizzes, but is one way or the other necessarily
easier? For writing papers, think about language barriers,
anxiety about writing ability, stress of writing papers, need for
self-motivation and time management, etc.
binarymax wrote 22 hours 25 min ago:
Because, assuming it's done properly w/o cheating, it's a great
learning tool. It's sometimes easy to forget that certain tasks
are the way they are because they're supposed to teach. We don't
structure teaching and learning around what the least painful thing
is.
otterley wrote 19 hours 20 min ago:
How wide is the gap between âleast painful thingâ and âmost
effective thingâ?
andy99 wrote 22 hours 40 min ago:
While itâs interesting work, so far my experience is that AI isnât
good enough (or most people arenât good enough with AI) for detection
to really be a concern, at least in âresearchâ or any writing over
a few sentences.
If you think about the 2x2 of âGoodâ vs âBy AIâ, you only
really care about the case when something it good work that an AI did,
and then only when catching cheaters, as opposed to deriving some
utility.
If itâs bad, who cares if itâs AI or not, and most AI is pretty
obvious thoughtless slop, and most people that use it arenât paying
attention to mask that, so I guess what Iâm saying is for most cases
one could just set a quality bar and see if the work passes.
I think maybe a difference AI brings is that in many cases people
donât really know how to understand or judge the quality of what they
are reading, or are to lazy to, so have substituted as proxies for
quality the same structural cues that AI now uses. So if youâre used
to saying âitâs well formatted, lots of bulleted lists, no spelling
mistakes, good use of adjectives, must be goodâ, now you have to
actually read it and think about it to know.
vages wrote 22 hours 34 min ago:
I personally would value a spam filter that filters out AI generated
content.
Legend2440 wrote 22 hours 52 min ago:
I suspect AI text detection has actually become easier, as chatbots
today have been heavily finetuned towards a more distinctive style.
For example âdelveâ and the em-dash are both a result of the
finetuning dataset, not the base LLM.
AuthAuth wrote 21 hours 31 min ago:
You are forgetting the human mind accounting for this and adding
"write this like a kinda dumb high school student". I just did a
little test between a copilot essay and the same prompt with "write
this like a kinda dumb high school student" and it reads like an
essay i would have written.
bryanrasmussen wrote 19 hours 16 min ago:
In the brave world of the future you too will be able to get a C-
with very little effort!
haffi112 wrote 22 hours 7 min ago:
That's where the humanizers come in. These are solutions that take
LLM generated text and make it sound human written to avoid
detection.
The principle of training them is quite simple. Take an LLM and
reward it for revising text so that it doesn't get detected.
Reinforcement learning takes care of the rest for you.
rawgabbit wrote 23 hours 19 min ago:
Wow. Never heard of Pangram until now. Quote:
Pangram maintains near-perfect accuracy across long and medium
length texts. It achieves very low error rates even on shorter passages
and âstubs.â
alfalfasprout wrote 22 hours 34 min ago:
I'm extremely skeptical of these claims. Especially when we're
dealing with careful prompting to adjust tone/style.
haffi112 wrote 22 hours 6 min ago:
Even if it was close to being near perfect, that is still not
enough due to the negative impact of false positive detections on
students.
zingababba wrote 22 hours 11 min ago:
Mmmm yes, I probably will never be able to find it again but
someone recently tested a lot of these out and found you could
bypass them easily by changing a few words around.
Mkengin wrote 20 hours 38 min ago:
Or use RL to beat any AI detectors:
URI [1]: https://reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1lnrd1t/you_can...
DIR <- back to front page