OpenAI has developed technology to reliably detect AI-generated text, according to inside sources and documents reported by the Wall Street Journal. However, the company is reluctant to release it, likely due to concerns about its own business model.
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.
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”.
but your low effort chatgpt copy/paste can be detected by OpenAI and nobody else
Low effort copy pastes can absolutely be detected by people who aren’t openAI. The consistent “advanced” vocabulary and excessively formal grammar used correctly, but with clear and significant comprehension gaps are pretty damn consistent. You won’t get perfect reliability, but you’ll catch most of it and you won’t have a huge number of false positives.
No that’s in no way reliable way of catching anyone and I hope people smarten up and avoid this snake oil entirely. I’m borderline jealous how these “ai catchers” are making so much money from straight up snake oil.
Plenty of humans absolutely can. LLM writing is genuinely fucking terrible. It has the slightly stilted over formality of most non-native speakers, without the intelligence being fluent in a second language implies.
Flawless grammar with a complete absence of any sign of intelligence is not something you get from humans.
The “can” is irrelevant here. Checking tool has to be reliable to be useful. What’s the use of having a checker that maybe detects something sometimes somewhat successfully?
There’s a massive gap between “you can’t make a tool” and “you can’t identify it”.
The problem with a tool is the exact same as the issue with LLMs to begin with. It does not resemble intelligence or comprehension in any way and cannot use it as an indicator.
But the use of LLMs is absolutely identifiable to moderately intelligent humans, because LLM output has raw language skills wildly inconsistent with every other skill that is part of writing.
What’s even point of your argument? That a detective can figure out who used AI? Yes detectives can figure out most stuff. This is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand my dude.
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 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.
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”.
Low effort copy pastes can absolutely be detected by people who aren’t openAI. The consistent “advanced” vocabulary and excessively formal grammar used correctly, but with clear and significant comprehension gaps are pretty damn consistent. You won’t get perfect reliability, but you’ll catch most of it and you won’t have a huge number of false positives.
Real people don’t sound like GPT.
No that’s in no way reliable way of catching anyone and I hope people smarten up and avoid this snake oil entirely. I’m borderline jealous how these “ai catchers” are making so much money from straight up snake oil.
An algorithm can’t.
Plenty of humans absolutely can. LLM writing is genuinely fucking terrible. It has the slightly stilted over formality of most non-native speakers, without the intelligence being fluent in a second language implies.
Flawless grammar with a complete absence of any sign of intelligence is not something you get from humans.
The “can” is irrelevant here. Checking tool has to be reliable to be useful. What’s the use of having a checker that maybe detects something sometimes somewhat successfully?
There’s a massive gap between “you can’t make a tool” and “you can’t identify it”.
The problem with a tool is the exact same as the issue with LLMs to begin with. It does not resemble intelligence or comprehension in any way and cannot use it as an indicator.
But the use of LLMs is absolutely identifiable to moderately intelligent humans, because LLM output has raw language skills wildly inconsistent with every other skill that is part of writing.
What’s even point of your argument? That a detective can figure out who used AI? Yes detectives can figure out most stuff. This is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand my dude.
What are you talking about “detectives”?
You said “nobody can identify LLM use” when any moderately intelligent human can identify LLM output pretty easily. It explodes off the page.
Whatever dude not playing these stupid games. You know exactly what I meant. Go away 👋