alt Hacker NewsWhether a text was written by a human or not is just a single bit of information. So you can't rule out its detectability a priori, since even the shortest text contains more information than that.
As long as LLMs are used to write texts humans wouldn't want to write if they could help it (that's why they're getting an LLM to do it, after all), they'll remain detectable. Even if the reasoning might end up equivalent to "This looks like spam; no human in their right mind would write this spam by hand if they could get an LLM to write it, therefore it's most likely written by an LLM."
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You definitely can rule out the general case a priori. If the problem were possible, for every text there would be a unique provenance label “human” or “ai”. But since humans and machines have both written many texts, it is not possible.
As an example, you could imagine a giant lookup table that deterministically mapped every text ever written to “human” or “AI”. You would very quickly run into situations where the labels conflict for the same piece of text.
The data is statistically inseparable which makes it impossible to classify from text alone.
> Whether a text was written by a human or not is just a single bit of information
I doubt this models reality well at all. If I write the first paragraph, and AI writes the second; a float seems to model that better. If you choose to collapse a float into a bool, I don't think you can make useful conclusions based on that bit?
> since even the shortest text contains more information than that.
I also don't think that's how information theory and bits of information works...
That's like saying whether or not you're going to fall in love this year is just one bit of information, so you might be able to read it from astrology. Yeah, sure, it might happen for some people with a certain star sign. But across the population there is zero reason to believe that there is a) any significant correlation and b) enough data variation in to even distinguish classes of humans.