OpenAI admits that AI writing detectors don’t work
OpenAI admits that AI writing detectors don’t work
arstechnica.com
OpenAI admits that AI writing detectors don’t work
15 comments
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I figured this was the case from th start. basically as useful as a polygraph.
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This isn't an admittance, as that implies a fault. This is a statement of fact. Of course AI writing detectors don't work, any human can write in any style, and an AI can replicate any writing style.
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AI can replicate any writing style.
This is false, mostly because AI outputs nonsense that almost looks like real writing. It's all firmly in the uncanny valley of gibberish.
Is true that an AI cannot spot AI writing, but for anything longer than a paragraph or two a human can spot AI output most of the time.
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I think the people who say stuff like this probably haven’t been interacting with one in a while, or maybe just didn’t know how to prompt it.
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As a professor that has to grade a lot of papers, I'm tempted to agree with this. But we probably need some well-conducted research to determine if this conventional wisdom is actually correct.
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This feels a little like people who think they can always spot plastic surgery, when really they can just always spot the bad-okay cases, but completely miss the good outcomes of plastic surgery
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Have you seen AI in recent months...? It's really not that cut and dry anymore. Might see some hiccups here and there but nowhere near the "uncanny valley of gibberish" levels you describe, at least not on the good ones
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15 comments
"admit" like this was something they denied? Everyone always knew that ai text detectors don't work and they never claimed otherwise.
The issue is that schools have been using detectors to flag AI essays. When students (wrongly) get caught up in them, they get penalized even if they never used any AI to help them write the essay in question. Sort of like a plagiarism filter falsely flagging a paragraph as plagiarized, even if the student didn’t plagiarize it.
It also disproportionately flags the work of neurodivergent students, to add a bonus reason that these detectors are a dogshit idea.
Oh yeah it's an issue, but none of that is on OpenAI. There's no admission here. It's a statement from an authority to shut up the idiots, like a map maker saying earth is a sphere, something we already know but somehow it's still believed by many.