alt Hacker NewsI think figuring out if a text is AI-made is a losing battle. What could work is gauging how much effort went into writing the text, regardless of who the author might be. What's easy today is generating mountains of text that are extremely hard to read. What requires effort is knowing how to engage the reader, how to keep out extraneous information, and how to keep the text as short as possible without losing details. That needs effort, with or without AI.
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…All I know is that sometimes I will read e.g. a HN submission, and it becomes pretty obvious partway through that the article was AI generated.
If I can do it, an algorithm should be able to do it. Maybe in the future the models will get so good that it is literally impossible to differentiate human vs computer authorship, but that’s obviously not the case today.
Sufficiently advanced AI use is probably fine. The slop everyone complains about has certain tells specifically due to some combination of the following:
- The author is conducting some kind of hustle.
- The author doesn't bother editing.
- The author lacks the taste and awareness enough to see it looks.
- The author thinks you, the reader, lack taste and awareness.
- The author is using it as a kind of smoke bomb to get rid of you.
In such cases, nothing is done about the LLM's distinctive "voice". It dominates the text and it's easy to detect. It stands as a signifier of the above, even if it's otherwise not intrinsically a problem to use AI.
There cant be a way / except of course if you pay / mind to my syllables
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The easiest way is to keep track of the text's edit history, keeping a block of edits over time and having them signed by a timestamp authority. The final edit history can then be inspected by some external authority, then signed if the edit history looks human. I have a blog post from 2023 on this topic: https://helbl.ing/Written-Proof-of-Work/
For Google Doc users, you can already inspect the edit history over time to verify that text is written by a human.