AI Detectors Get It Wrong. Writers Are Being Fired Anyway

1. *Generic Language and Lack of Specific Detail*: The article describes Kimberly Gasuras’s experience with broad, generalized statements that lack specific, nuanced detail that a human writer with deep knowledge might include. For instance, phrases like "I don’t need it," and "How do you think I did all that work?" are rather cliché and could indicate AI usage due to their non-specific nature.

2. *Frequent Mention of AI and Related Technologies*: The story frequently references AI technologies and tools, which might be a characteristic of AI-written content trying to maintain thematic relevance. The tools mentioned, such as "Originality" and others like Copyleaks and GPTZero, align closely with typical AI text outputs that often include relevant keywords to boost perceived relevance and accuracy of the content.

3. *Narrative Coherence and Flow*: The narrative flows in a structured manner typical of AI outputs, where each paragraph introduces new information in a systematic way without the nuanced transitions we might expect from a seasoned journalist. This can be seen in transitions like, "It was already a difficult time. Then the email came." This kind of straightforward sequencing is common in AI writing.

4. *Absence of Emotional Depth or Personal Insight*: Despite discussing a personal and potentially distressing situation for Gasuras, the article does not delve deeply into her emotional response or provide personal insights that a human writer might include. The statement, "I couldn’t believe it," is as deep as it gets, which seems superficial for someone discussing their own career challenges.

5. *Repetitive and Redundant Information*: The article repeats certain themes and statements, such as the reliability issues of AI detectors and the impact on personal livelihoods. For example, the repetition of the impact of AI on writers and the functionality of AI detectors in multiple paragraphs could suggest an AI's attempt to emphasize key points without introducing new or insightful commentary.

6. *Use of Industry Buzzwords and Phrases*: The language includes buzzwords and phrases typical of AI-related discussions, such as "AI boogeymen," "peace of mind," "proof," and "accountability." These terms are often used to artificially enhance the thematic strength of the content, a common technique in AI-generated texts to align closely with expected keyword density and relevance.

These elements collectively suggest the possible use of AI in crafting the article, particularly in terms of the language used, the structure of the narrative, and the absence of deeper, personalized insights one would expect from a human writer discussing their own experiences.

Do you really think it would help? The kind of people who believe an "AI detector" works will just ignore your complicated attempts to prove otherwise; it's the word of your complex system (which requires manual analysis) against the word of the "AI detector" (a simple system in which you just have to press a button and it says "guilty" or "not guilty").

The more complicated you make your system (and adding a blockchain makes it even more complicated!), and the more it needs human judgment (someone has to review the keystrokes, to make sure it's not the writer manually retyping the output of a LLM), the less it will be believed.

The rest is silly, because you can emulate the whole writing process by combining backtracking https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05426 and a rewriting/rewording loop.

With not much effort we can make LLM output look incredibly painstaking.

Let's not build Hell on Earth for whatever reason it momentarily seems to make business sense.

So much of the discussion focuses on the creators of works, but what about the changes in consumers, who seem to be splitting between those who don't mind AI and those who want to oppose anything involving AI (including merely looking like AI). Is there enough consumers in the group that opposes AI but is okay with AI looking content as long as it is proven not to be AI?

"AI looking content" would be decided on an individual by individual basis, with some percentage using AI detection software in their decision making process, with that software being varying degrees of snake oil.

Just writing this down here instantly invalidates the premise.

An overkill variant to rub salt in the wounds of duped investors: make the script control a finger bot on an X/Y harness, so it literally presses the physical keys of a physical keyboard according to LLM output.

Bonus points for making a Kickstarter out of it and getting some YouTubers to talk about it (even as a joke) - then sitting back to watch as some factories in China go brrrr, and dropshippers flood the market with your "solution" before your fundraising campaign even ends.

Youre right, that is idiotic. Ill offer $500m for it if we go by VC standards

I mean, I was a kid. But every new thing was cool and exciting. Now its just scams and WMDs.

"Says mulching machine maker to tree about to be turned into mulch."

We'll have to wait and see if AI is like prior technological breakthroughs, i.e. does it eliminate drudgery and enable a higher level of creativity, at the short-term cost of some drudgerous jobs? This has been the case in the past.

I'm not hopeful. In the past, technology has performed work we didn't want to do in order to enable us to do work we did want to do. We want work that is expressive and creative and satisfying, but that is exactly the work that AI is increasingly replacing. AI can generate a pretty decent pop song today, and is still improving. Why will any media company want to pay human songwriters, musicians, producers, and publicists when AI can do all of that for near-zero cost and satisfy the vast majority of pop music consumers? AI can generate a decent story for a sports report from a box score and play summary of a game. The same with most other news and copywriting, the same with programming, the same with making movies, the same with art and design. If not today, then soon.

What can't it do? It can't do the laundry. It can't do the dishes. It can't cook dinner. It can't drive the car. It can't build a house. It can't paint a wall or fix a leaky pipe. And to the extent that technology can or will be able to do those things, it will involve expensive physical devices, because those tasks exist in the real physical world, not the digital world. Who will buy them when nobody can get paid for more creative work?

Kinda like why in the old days, you'd see comment spam with a lengthy but meaningless auto generated message to go with it.

Alternatively, it might be to sell said account to spammers later down the line, since said spammers want to buy social media accounts that have a bunch of legitimate activity associated with them.

Good, im on here too much already.

Who's going to "[release the data] describing some event or really anything"?

It's not like there's some objective "data packet" behind every article that can be had for free.

> The journalism industry has failed in their mission, and nobody that should trust it trusts it anymore. Articles are simply what someone else wants you to think.

The "AI" era will be worse in that regard, not better. You're essentially saying "The food at the restaurant is terrible and I don't like it, so in the future to solve that problem we'll eat shit instead."

I mean, when the whole 2nd thing is completely automated because its bar is so low anything from 2 years ago could do it, that kinda only leaves the 1st option as a business idea.

If you're not doing a better job than the best machine, you're stealing your wages from the capitalists.

https://www.reddit.com/r/academia/comments/14wa4nz/professor...

Why its different:

Nobody cares who originally wrote the code as long as it works (ideally longer, rather than shorter). Software is intrinsically self-automating, so valuable skills are more along diagnosis and pattern recognition lines rather than specific skills themselves (yesteryears COBOL master could well be a JR engineer (or more likely management) at a startup). And also, people in charge of software companies have more on-hand people that may understand how AI works, and thus, not rely on such a system to the same extent (being generous to the c-suite here, we'll see shortly lol).

The major newspapers and magazines used to have good editors and proofreaders and it used to be rare to see misspellings or awkward sentences, but those editors have been seriously cut back and you see these much more commonly.

But hey, let’s blame something else.

Most of the time AI slop reads like a soulless corporate ad. Probably because most of the content the AI was trained on was already SEO optimized bullshit mass produced on company blogs. I'd very much like a tool that would detect and filter out also those from "my internet".

AI detectors are useless, you're right, but for the same reason AI is unreliable in other contexts, not because AI writing is reliably passable.