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Comment by twawaaay | Hacker News Reader

Nope, it can't.

Detecting AI-generated text is an adversarial process. Meaning there are going to exist people interested in avoiding detection. This just ensures there is never going to be a reliable solution. There will be some solutions but none that will be reliable.

We still have counterfeit banknotes and email spam. Seems like super easy problem to fix but there are always some banknotes and always some email spam that avoid detection. And this is simply because whenever somebody finds a way to close the current hole, somebody else finds a way to open another.

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Agreed. And it's also the wrong way to approach this problem. We don't need to stop AI text, if some kid on reddit thinks it's funny to run an account posting GPT-3 replies that by itself isn't an issue. Frankly some of the human interactions aren't any more useful than what you'd get with a bot, on the contrary even in some cases.

The big danger is the internet getting flooded with machine generated content. All social networks, all of Wikipedia, everything. To stop this we need sybil resistant sign-up processes. We need to verify the user running the account is an individual human who does not control 1000 other accounts through automation. There needs to be proof of personhood and we should have had this yesterday already. Sites like Twitter and Facebook are swarming with bot accounts as we speak.

That's kinda dystopic...

There are two futures: One is Sam Altman taking everyone's iris scans (I'm not making this up). In the other we have privacy preserving decentralized solutions to proving our unique humanity.

On flooding the Internet with generated content, the cat is out of the bag. There are already people paid to create lots of "personal" accounts and then create content like posts or reviews. This entire "industry" is getting transformed as we speak to AI-generated content.

I think this is unavoidable.

I think (at least I really wish) there is a chance that young people will rebel and will decline using the Internet and instead learn to cherish personal contact. It make take a generation for this to happen (ie. current children to find out how miserable the Internet is in couple of years). It is also possible that certified human-generated content will become a luxury that you will have to pay extra.

It may take some time for people to catch on, but they will find that trying to interact with a website flooded with bots is meaningless, rewardless. Even Internet trolls will stop getting their kick. Internet will become a cesspool where nobody ventures for fun because there is no fun to be had.

Worldcoin, founded by Sam Altman, aims to address this problem. It's an interesting proposal.

https://worldcoin.org/

> email spam

Even after a decade, it's really, really rare email spam to get past the gmail filter (at least in my experience)

I used to agree with you but seems like the gmail filter is getting worse and worse, at least it has for me the last few years.

I mark everything that manages to bypass it as spam, but the day after almost identical spam messages manage to break through anyway...

It has to do more with things outside of the text itself.

Usually it's because it's of popular spam subjects, spoofed domains, untrustworthy email servers, etc.

There is targeted spam now in my own language and location; it gets past the filters because it doesn't look like spam at all. I think most spam gets flagged as spam, not because the text context but because of the from/to server / domain / email address.

Ever since December, I've noticed a massive uptick in spam getting past my Gmail filter. We are talking 100+ emails per day selling sexual enhancement drugs, marital aids, conspiranoid prepper nonsense, money mule scams, crypto extortion and various other drivel.

What they all have in common is that they're seemingly going through some kind of spinning algorithm to word them differently enough to avoid the filter picking them up.

It's not the judgement about interests around a type of process, but the fundamental process itself: it leaves no "tooling marks." There is no way to see it was "made by a human" or "made by an algorithm" because there is no metadata and no telltale marks left in the pure data of a string of text.

Perhaps in a fit of reactionary over-regulation overreach and wishful half-measures, governments decide to make it a very serious crime to generate anything by AI without submitting a signature to a planetary repository of AI generated works. It won't work for obvious impractical, unenforceable, and spread of variations but it will make them feel like they've "tamed" a disruption when, like climate change, they've done absolutely nothing.

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