OpenAI just admitted it can’t identify AI-generated text. That’s bad for the internet and it could be really bad for AI models.::In January, OpenAI launched a system for identifying AI-generated text. This month, the company scrapped it.
OpenAI just admitted it can’t identify AI-generated text. That’s bad for the internet and it could be really bad for AI models.::In January, OpenAI launched a system for identifying AI-generated text. This month, the company scrapped it.
If it could, it couldn’t claim that the content out produced was original. If AI generated content were detectable, that would be a tacit admission that it is entirely plagiarized.
Being detectable does not mean plagiarism. The way they did it was by using a fixed rule for generating high entropy words. These are words that can be replaced with a large number of different words without changing the meaning of the sentence. Given any original passage of text, it’s very unlikely for those words to all exactly follow the rule set by the generator, but a generated text will always have this rule followed, so they can be distinguished. Likewise, You can take any original passage and replace words in this fashion to increase the odds of it being detected as AI generated and the resulting text will still be original text.
Here’s the thing though - the probabilities for word choice come from the data the model was trained on. While someone that uses a substantially different writing style / word choice than the LLM could easily be identified as being not from the LLM, someone with a similar writing style might be indistinguishable from the LLM.
Or, to oversimplify: given that Reddit was a large portion of the input data for ChatGPT, all you need to do is write like a Redditor to sound like ChatGPT.