689
OpenAI confirms that AI writing detectors don’t work
(arstechnica.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
689 points (95.6% liked)
Technology
58132 readers
4284 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
If you ask this thing whether or not some given text is AI generated, and it is only right 26% of the time, then I can think of a real quick way to make it 74% accurate.
I feel like this must stem from a misunderstanding of what 26% accuracy means, but for the life of me, I can't figure out what it would be.
Specificity vs sensitivity, no?
In statistics, everything is based off probability / likelihood - even binary yes or no decisions. For example, you might say "this predictive algorithm must be at least 95% statistically confident of an answer, else you default to unknown or another safe answer".
What this likely means is only 26% of the answers were confident enough to say "yes" (because falsely accusing somebody of cheating is much worse than giving the benefit of the doubt) and were correct.
There is likely a large portion of answers which could have been predicted correctly if the company was willing to chance more false positives (potentially getting studings mistakenly expelled).