OpenAI confirms that AI writing detectors don’t work

fne8w2ah@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 683 points –
OpenAI confirms that AI writing detectors don’t work
arstechnica.com
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Regardless of if they do or don't, surely it's in the interests of the people making the "AI" to claim that their tool is so good it's indistinguishable from humans?

Depends if they’re more researchers or a business imo. Scientists generally speaking are very cautious about making shit claims bc if they get called out that’s their career really.

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.

Yes, but it's such a falsifiable claim that anyone is more than welcome to prove them wrong. There's a lot of slightly different LLMs out there. If you or anyone else can definitively show there's a machine that can identify AI writing vs human writing, it will either result in better AI writing or it would be an amazing breakthrough in understanding the limits of AI.

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.