I don't understand what you're saying about GPT detectors. Are you angry that people are promoting detectors that don't work, or are you angry that OpenAI used to offer one and no longer do?
It was pulled because while it caught on the order of 25 of pure AI output, it missed the rest. But I’m cool with that number, in a world where so much AI in human writing? That’s a total win on low-effort propaganda. Anyone should be cool with that number.
Unfortunately they had to pull it because something like 9% of human authored text got hit with the AI flag. Again, some people are starting to write like it. It’s gonna happen.
This is from memory, so if I’ve got some that wrong I’ll retract that and leave my other reasons as more than sufficient to indicate serious change.
But a lot of propaganda is going to take place at the grassroots level by actors who can’t beat OpenAI, even one in decline, at breaking both watermarks and an adversarial model.
But the grand finale is of course, at this point how has OpenAI behaved like anything other than an APT itself. It’s the friendly, plucky underdog charity that’s now manipulating the process on making things illegal without involving congress.
That’s exactly how advanced actors operate: look at the xz thing.
That tool had to be almost perfect, if not actually perfect, to exist. And it decidedly was not. I think the AI safety people are somewhat contemptuous but this is not the tree to be barking up imo.
Besides, other people are offering this or will soon, so they have an obligation to push the performance via competition.
And who put them in charge of trying to set society’s policies on this: it’s the wildest overreach by far in an industry known for wild unilateral overreach.
Am I correct in thinking you are criticizing OpenAI for taking down their non-working GPT Detector?
Of all the things OpenAI deserve criticism for this seems to be an odd one. It just didn't work: as you say it couldn't properly detect GPT authored text and it incorrectly flagged human text as written by GPT.
That just seems bad all around?
The non-functional OpenAI tool claimed to be a LLM detector but didn't work, so they were 100% right to withdraw it.
There is an endless stream of stories about students who have their work flagged as "AI generated" by a detector when it wasn't - and then get failing grades, from teachers who don't understand that AI detectors are inherently inaccurate.
Here's a paper about how unreliable they are from last year: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11156
OpenAI shutting down theirs was the right call.
- whisper is really useful, it has good applications in strictly socially positive settings (accessibility as one example), and its scope for abuse is very consistent with how they’ve opened up the weights. the whisper people either still are, or until recently were, doing the right thing. - the TTS stuff is a little less cut and dried, but TTS is among the more potentially dangerous capability increases, and I can see an argument for going a little slower there, for a number of reasons. I still think they’re behind on opening that up, but the voice group has a case there, even if it is thin and I personally disagree. - the detection stuff, they were pushing the pace on tools researchers and institutions need. they deserve the same credit for doing that, which I’m giving them, as blame for pulling it, which I’m giving them. that was consistent with their stated mandate.
If you’re going to criticize and institution stridently to the point of calling it a menace, as I am, you are held to a higher standard on being fair, and I acknowledge the good and positive and non-remunerative work, or at lead the headline stuff.
Turning off the good stuff is one more really, really red flag.
Interesting point you touched here. Let's do the math for OpenAI: 100M users, with 10k tokens/user/month, that means 1 trillion tokens/month are read by people. That has got to influence speech and circulate information faster between all fields.
Sophisticated fraud, that’s complicated.
But most fraud is dumb.