alt Hacker NewsWhen "detectors" first started popping up all over the place, all of them rated the declaration of independence as 100% AI written, so... Yeah, these things just don't work. And what's even more dangerous is that people that don't understand how any of it works use these tools, and accuse people of using AI, sometimes with grave consequences. Students have been through this, at all levels of education.
Replies
In fairness, the original crop of detectors were based on perplexity scores and were entirely useless (famously, the declaration of independence often came back as 100% AI generated).
I'm not convinced we'll ever have full-proof detectors, and certainly the false-positive rate will make them irresponsible for accusations of intellectual/academic fraud, I do think that LLMs are easy for folks to sniff out on average so I imagine it's possible to detect many instances.
Pangram's detector is anecdotally very accurate in my tests. This detector appears to be fine-tuned on a very small dataset (200 papers per subject), and suspect the problem might be in part that.
They use a "threshold calibrated so pre-ChatGPT papers flag at 0.4%", so these things do work most of the time. It also means that there are known false positives, so for any given paper, scoring above the threshold isn't irrefutable proof of AI usage. But for things like estimating the overall proportion of AI writing, you only need to be correct on average, so individual false positives don't matter much.
I replied to a comment with a structured informal proof on HN.
A well established user here was adamant that I used AI because apparently humans never ever wrote proofs.
This was a while ago. Any well crafted human output is now being dismissively cast as AI if the reader is challenged by the output intellectually/politically.