Doesn't this mean Google has an AI-detector that is somehow accurately finding these? Otherwise the majority of its index would be falsely flagged.
What do they use?
What do they use?
No, it means that someone was afraid they would use an AI detector similar to the one that was being used and downrank based on it; nothing in the article suggests Google is in fact using any AI-detector in its ranking algorithm, and I suspect that Google would be quite happy if people used AI (especially Google’s AI) to produce content that otherwise ranked highly on Google algorithms.
But Google is probably a close second, with an even bigger archive of pre-LLM text (including the world's largest collection of digitized books), and supposedly a good LLM and lots of smart ML engineers.
But no matter what method google finds, whether it's some complex AI trained on massive amounts of training data or a simple n-gram analysis that ends up being telling, they aren't going to tell us. That would just accelerate the arms-race between LLM spam and LLM detection. If they have something that works (big if) the details will stay hidden, the best we are going to get is some kind of press release aimed at dissuading people from using AI on their websites.
And of course you don't tell people how your LLM detector works, don't provide a public API, and preferably leave it ambiguous whether it even exists. That solves most issues with LLMs using your detection method to get better in future versions.
That's counter to the business model of these LLM detection websites, but Google doesn't have a problem with keeping any potentially existing models inhouse and locked down.
If you detect LLMs 100% of the time correctly, it is irrelevant if you also incorrectly detect human written text as LLM text 80% of the time. "Detect them all and let god sort them out" will eventually fail as a business plan.