When the first commercial AI detectors arrived in late 2022 and early 2023, it wasn’t exactly an auspicious start. News articles and social media posts showing AI detectors flagging the Declaration of Independence and the opening lines of the Book of Genesis as AI-generated were soon making the rounds. Either the Founding Fathers were also using AI to cheat on their homework, the comments sections quipped, or AI detectors did not work as advertised.
These false positives — instances when detectors label human-written text as AI-generated — were due to how the initial models worked. They evaluated how surprising a given text’s word choice was (a measurement called _perplexity_) alongside how often those surprising choices were dispersed throughout (_burstiness_). Since we know large language models (LLMs) produce text by predicting what statistically fits next in a given sequence based on their training data, a low perplexity-burstiness combination should signal a high likelihood of AI authorship.
Being as often cited and quoted as they are, the Declaration and the Book of Genesis proved anything but surprising, revealing a weakness in this approach. Now, in addition to worrying about whether we could trust that something we read came from an actual person, we also had to keep a watchful eye on the watchmen. Three years on, and that worry hasn’t abated.
True, AI detectors have improved, but false positives still occur, and that leaves some in the unenviable position of having to defend their hard work against accusations of AI slop. As a writer and editor, I need to understand these detectors and how to use them without ruining the trust I’ve built with my readers and fellow writers. To help me start figuring that out, I spoke with Max Spero, the cofounder and CEO of Pangram, a popular AI detector.
We discussed how today’s AI detectors work, how these probabilistic tools fit into today’s culture, and the social norms we can start building around them to help us preserve authenticity in writing. **Big Think:** Why did you start Pangram, and why will AI detectors be important in this new AI era? **Max Spero:** We were thinking about how we could build for a post-AI world and what that world would need. That’s when we landed on detectability technology. Even if not intelligent, AI seems intelligent and can produce large volumes of content.
If that is completely indistinguishable from [what is] human, then we have a problem on our hands. When [Anthropic CEO] Dario Amodei was at OpenAI, he was saying that GPT-3 is too powerful to release to the world [because] a bad actor could generate hundreds of thousands of fake news articles and post them online. In retrospect, the technology wasn’t there, but I think we’re seeing this today.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
