<story><title>OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy</title><url>https://decrypt.co/149826/openai-quietly-shutters-its-ai-detection-tool</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>capableweb</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m glad that they did, although they should obviously done an announcement for it.&lt;p&gt;The amount of people in the ecosystem who thinks it&amp;#x27;s even possible to detect if something is AI written or not when it&amp;#x27;s just a couple of sentences is staggering high. And somehow, people in power seems to put their faith in some of these tools that guarantee a certain amount of truthfulness when in reality it&amp;#x27;s impossible they could guarantee that, and act on whatever these &amp;quot;AI vs Human-written&amp;quot; tool tell them to.&lt;p&gt;So hopefully this can serve as another example that it&amp;#x27;s simply not possible to detect if a bunch of characters were outputted by an LLM or not.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>feoren</author><text>Indeed it&amp;#x27;s not possible. Say you had a classifier that detected whether a given text was AI generated or not. You can easily plug this classifier into the end of a generative network trying to fool it, and even backpropagate all the way from the yes&amp;#x2F;no output to the input layer of the generative network. Now you can easily generate text that fools that classifier.&lt;p&gt;So such a model is doomed from the start, unless its parameters are a closely-guarded secret (and never leaked). Then it means it&amp;#x27;s foolable by those with access and nobody else. Which means there&amp;#x27;s a huge incentive for adversaries to make their own, etc. etc. until it&amp;#x27;s just a big arms race.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s clear the actual answer needs to be: we need better automated tools to detect &lt;i&gt;quality content&lt;/i&gt;, whatever that might mean, whether written by a human or an AI. That would be a godsend. And if it turned into an arms race, the arms we&amp;#x27;re racing each other to build are just higher-quality content.</text></comment>
<story><title>OpenAI shuts down its AI Classifier due to poor accuracy</title><url>https://decrypt.co/149826/openai-quietly-shutters-its-ai-detection-tool</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>capableweb</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m glad that they did, although they should obviously done an announcement for it.&lt;p&gt;The amount of people in the ecosystem who thinks it&amp;#x27;s even possible to detect if something is AI written or not when it&amp;#x27;s just a couple of sentences is staggering high. And somehow, people in power seems to put their faith in some of these tools that guarantee a certain amount of truthfulness when in reality it&amp;#x27;s impossible they could guarantee that, and act on whatever these &amp;quot;AI vs Human-written&amp;quot; tool tell them to.&lt;p&gt;So hopefully this can serve as another example that it&amp;#x27;s simply not possible to detect if a bunch of characters were outputted by an LLM or not.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>catboybotnet</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s also the post going around about how it can (and does) falsely flag human posts as AI output, particularly among some autistic people. About as useful as a polygraph, no?</text></comment>