this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
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[–] Alphane_Moon 163 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Given a sufficient amount of text, the method is said to be 99.9 percent effective.

If that's really the case, they should release some benchmarks. I am skeptical. Promising the world is a key component of their "business model".

[–] [email protected] 41 points 3 months ago

I don't think these grifters know what a benchmark is.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 months ago

I think given enough output I could probably detect it that accurately as well. ChatGPT has a particular voice and the longer it goes, the more that voice comes out.

[–] NegativeInf 11 points 3 months ago

What is a sufficient amount? Most comments are short af.

[–] [email protected] 155 points 3 months ago

"A 99.9% accurate ChatGPT AI text detector? At this time of year! At this time of day! In this part of the country! Localized entirely within your company?!?"

"Yes"

"May I see it?“

"No"

[–] DrCataclysm 106 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The detection rate is worthless, an algorithm that says anything is Chatgpt would have a detection rate of 100%. What would be more interesting than that is the false positive rate but they never talk about that.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

The detector provides an assessment of how likely it is that all or part of the document was written by ChatGPT. Given a sufficient amount of text, the method is said to be 99.9 percent effective.

That means given 100 pieces of text and asked if they are made by ChatGPT or not, it gets maybe one of them wrong. Allegedly, that is, and with the caveat of "sufficient amount of text", whatever that means.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 months ago

It’s actually 1 in 1000, 99.0% would be 1/100.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (2 children)

A false positive is when it incorrectly determines that a human written text is written by AI. While a detection rate of 99.9% sounds impressive, it’s not very reliable if it comes with a false positive rate of 20%.

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

it's only 99.9% accurate because they haven't released it. As soon as they do, it will quickly fall to 50% as usual. Because this type of thing is exactly what's needed to develop tech to defeat itself.

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[–] Cyteseer 67 points 3 months ago

If they aren't willing to release it, then the situation is no different from them not having one at all. All these claims openai makes about having whatever system but hiding it, is just tobtry and increase hype to grab more investor money.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Total coincidence that this "news" appears about a day after several articles saying the AI bubble is starting to burst.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 3 months ago

I call bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 3 months ago (3 children)

If you believe this, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 months ago (1 children)

A routine that just returns "yes" will also detect all AI. It would just have an abnormally high false positive rate.

[–] BluesF 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

My model has 100% recall and 50% precision, not bad eh?

But - that model would not have 99.9% accuracy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Agreed. Personally I think this whole thing is bs.

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[–] x00z 41 points 3 months ago

ALL conversations are logged and can be used however they want.

I'm almost certain this "detector" is a simple lookup in their database.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 3 months ago

Probably because it doesn't work. It's not difficult for Open AI to see if any given conversation is one of their conversations. If I were them I would hash the results of each conversation and then store that hash in a database for quick searching.

That's useless for actual AI detection

[–] [email protected] 35 points 3 months ago

She goes to another school
(for intelligent ificial art)

[–] [email protected] 34 points 3 months ago (2 children)

The detector is most likely a machine learning algorithm. That said, releasing that would allow for adversarial training. (An LLM that would not be detected). Therefore they can only offer maybe an api to use it but can not give unlimited access to the model.

[–] credo 28 points 3 months ago

This is the reason. Releasing it would invalidate it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

If u release an api for it u can still use that to make training data to beat it.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 months ago (1 children)

They’re keeping everything anyway, so what’s preventing them from doing a DB look up to see if it (given a large enough passage of text) exist in their output history?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago

I believe the actual detector is similar. They know what sentences are likely generated by chatgpt, since that's literally in their model. They probably also have to some degree reverse engineered typical output from competing models.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago
[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 months ago

There is no way it's that accurate, which is why they don't want to release it.

[–] drmoose 15 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (10 children)

Lots of misinformation in this thread. Yes they have it, it's good but it's probably nowhere close to 99.9% accuracy.

The primary way to detect AI is to inject a fingerprint into AI generation in the first place. This means only the model creators can do that. We don't exactly know how the fingerprint works but it can be as simple as preferring 1 word synonym over the other. For example preferring word synonyms like "illustrate", "peer" etc. quickly ads up to a statistical

These techniques pre-date chatgpt itself and do work! However there are a lot of caveats:

  • The fingerprint has to be trained for each model meaning each model version performs slightly differently and only owners know the fingerprint.
  • The fingerprint test can only work on longer bodies of text that are not modified further.
  • Extending model through more complex instructions (like character, tone) or RAG can significantly decrease the effectiveness.

The industry is understandably very secretive about it but your low effort chatgpt copy/paste can be detected by OpenAI and nobody else.

As for public release of the fingerprint: they can't as it can be reverse engineered so it's only valuable as an internal tool for now. Also if released it would serve no real purpose as detection can be easily defeated by remixing content to dilute the fingerprint.

[–] EnderMB 4 points 3 months ago

Agreed. Frankly, if someone were to say "we can detect with 99% accuracy" I imagine that someone would say "well, clearly your measurements are wrong, find the issue and come back to us when it's fixed".

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

That's a bad article. What are they reluctant about? Releasing that detector, or applying watermarks to the generated texts? Do they do that already or doesn't it apply to text generated until then? And how would that affect anything else?

Whats with the error rate? Shouldn't that be near 100% for watermarks? And 0 false positives? What's really holding them back? Is pupils not turning in ChatGPT homework anymore cutting into their business model?

I mean all the major AI companies promised to do AI ethically. Now they don't want the one thing that would solve half the issues people are having with that technology. Kind of fits with OpenAI 🤔

[–] drmoose 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

They can't release anything as watermarks can be reverse engineered and people would just wise up and tumble the outputs.

Weirdly, not releasing this tool publicly might be the smartest bet here as all of these bot farms and idiots just blindly use chatgpt outputs without any tumbling or safety.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

You can just ask ChatGPT if a text was written by it.
If it is, it's legally obligated to tell you!

[–] prime_number_314159 8 points 3 months ago

Don't joke about this, the college professors will hear you.

[–] FlyingSquid 9 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I wonder if this means they've discovered a serious flaw that they don't know how to fix yet?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 months ago

The flaw is in the training to make it corporate friendly. Everything it says eventually sounds like a sexual harassment training video, regardless of subject.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

I think the more like explanation is that being able to filter out AI-generated text gives them an advantage over their competitors at obtaining more training data.

[–] Etterra 7 points 3 months ago

If they have one, and that's IF, then of course they won't release it. They're still trying to find a use case for their stupid toy so that they can charge people for it. Releasing the counter agent would be completely contradictory to their business model. It's like Umbrella Corp. but even dumber.

[–] _sideffect 4 points 3 months ago

Did they claim it or prove it? I don't believe anything tech says

[–] Loduz_247 3 points 3 months ago

This technology will not be published until the GPT-3 code is released.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Let me guess: too much processing power?

[–] expatriado 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

shhh, my professor may use it

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

My unpopular opinion is when they're assigning well beyond 40 hours per week of homework, cheating is no longer unethical. Employers want universities to get students used to working long hours.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I agree, and I teach. A huge part of learning is having the time to experiment and process what you’ve learnt. However, doing that in a way that can be controlled, examined, etc, is very difficult so many institutions opt for tons of homework etc.

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