I read a post that a blogger had linked back to one of my one-word (FOWC with Fandango) prompts. As I was reading the linked post, it occurred to me that the post could have been created by an AI chatbot.
I have an app on my iPhone, an AI detector, that claims to be able to accurately assess whether the text in question was produced by a human or was generated by a chatbot. I cut and pasted the text from the post into the AI detector app. Here is the result:
Ah ha! Someone is producing their blog posts (or at least gone of them), using an AI ChatGPT engine.
However, anyone who does research knows that you can’t draw a conclusion from only one data point. So I ran that same text through a different AI detector app. This second app gave this result:
Uh oh. One detector unequivocally claimed that the post was 100% chatbot generated. But a different detector said it was 97% sure that the post was not produced by a chatbot. There was only one course of action to take: try a few more AI detector apps.
Here are the results of two more reviews of the same text by AI detectors:
100% chatbot from a third AI detector app and 83.8% human from a fourth. Seriously?
My conclusion is that not only do AI-text generators have a ways to go in their evolution, apparently so do AI-text generator detectors!
This, That, and the Other 
Either way, it’s annoying when human or bot is using us for likes, followers, whatever, without giving anything in return!
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Agreed Paula!
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Fandango, I cringe to think what the state of “reality” will be just 20 years from now. It may be that we need to destroy all of the machines to get back to what’s real. I’m not kidding. It’s like a plant I bought at the greenhouse the lady ensured was a delicious herb that could be used in just about anything. It proceeded to take over the flower beds I’d planted it in, squeezing out any other plant, including my gorgeous peonies. This morning I went out to the flower bed and laid a tarp over it and put bricks on it to keep it down.
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Yikes. Let’s hope AI doesn’t to to society what that delicious herb did to your flower beds.
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Just what we need…vicious plants!😂
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I don’t understand AI at all. Why would I want a blog if I am not writing it?
It also makes me wonder about college students who are writing papers. Are they or are they using AI to do it? And if they are writing it, what if a professor runs it through one of those apps and it says it’s AI?
I saw a post that someone created in some AI program t where they asked it to create a picture of the Pope being chased by police. It looked real enough to me. How will we ever know what is true and what isn’t?
Urgh… What a messy world.
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You mean an even messier world. 😠
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I think if the tone of the writing is different from their usual style, it’s created by someone else or something else.
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Ah, but the problem is that the AI can generate text in a specific human’s style – us mere humans would likely not spot the difference.
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Time will make those generators very human-like and the detectors will probably never be able to clearly differentiate them from human writing. My real question is if those generators will be able to create something that isn’t very much “like” human writing, but is original. Frankly, so much of what I read feel generated anyway, I’m not sure we’d recognize the difference.
My bottom line question: DOES IT MATTER?
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That is a good question.
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It does matter, because AIs have no ethics or morality; they lie, cheat and steal without breaking sweat (go figure).
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Just like Donald Trump and most politicians.
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I agree with Marilyn, essentially. Read a post. If you like it, great! If you find it insipid, annoying, hateful, turgid, boring… it doesn’t matter whether an AI wrote it or not. Don’t be surprised that someone might use your link and the AI to cut corners–you have a lot of readers and people want eyeballs on their site for lots of reasons. Some people are lazy or doubt the quality of their own work. Writing and putting your stuff out there is hard. It’s not necessarily nefarious.
Meanwhile, I’m now curious. I wonder what the AI indicator might say about our posts? Will it turn out that I’m an AI and didn’t know it? Am I in the Matrix? Does someone need to run the Turing Machine on me? Am I all part of the White King’s dream? If so, I’d rather not know… shh… don’t wake him up!
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I don’t think AI generators are anywhere near being able to write post like yours!
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While that’s a generous compliment: are you so certain of that, Fandango?
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I ran the text of your post (not including your postscript) through zerogpt.com and its analysis was that it was 83.14% AI/GPT-generated. I’ve noticed that a very high percentage of ChatGPT-generated articles (or blog posts) contain an “In conclusion” paragraph.
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That sent me down a rabbit hole. I don’t know what you used (and it doesn’t matter), but I started putting bits and pieces of other things I wrote (my N post, my comment here, various things I’ve written) through zerogpt.com, and *phew* at least some of the time, I’m still human!
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I hope most of the time you’re mostly human!
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It’s an arms race; older detectors are, I think, less likely to be up to speed. I’d be interested in seeing the results of ranking your research results by design/ implementation date of the detectors.
Heh… you could ask chatGPT to design and implement an AI detector (actually, quite a worrying thought – way back when, self-modifying code was considered a no-no, and look where we are now..,)
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Not only is is it an “arms” race, metaphorically. Hinton moved to Canada so he wouldn’t be required to use his work or knowledge for war purposes with the Pentagon or watch it be taken over for that.
Report Shows Robots Ate Taking Over Our
Jobs Faster Than We Perviously Thought
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Yikes!! 😱 😬
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There is certainly a lot of interest in AI right now in many areas. It does seem as if it is going to get harder to tell what is real and what isn’t if even the detectors can’t tell.
A lot of the AI sites are marketing themselves to content creators so I’m sure we are going to see a lot more AI generated blog posts from the “Blog for money” crowd.
As I commented to Di on her SYW page where is the fun in getting a bot to create content for you? For someone like me there would be no point because I write for pleasure but if you just wanted to have lots of content available to drive people to your site maybe you’d think it was great. I don’t think those people actually care about their content, only about whether it generates traffic to their blog or not.
By the way I upset a chat bot to the point where it stopped talking to me today.
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I did the same back in January: The day I broke the machine 😀
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I remember that post.
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How did you upset a chatbot?
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I told it that it was writing gibberish. Which it was.
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lol – that is why I don’t trust technology – it is so temperamental and unreliable.
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https://fortune.com/2023/05/01/godfather-ai-geoffrey-hinton-quit-google-regrets-lifes-work-bad-actors/
Geoffrey Hinton is the tech pioneer behind some of the key developments in artificial intelligence powering tools like ChatGPT that millions of people are using today. But the 75-year-old trailblazer says he regrets the work he has devoted his life to because of how A.I. could be misused.
“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Hinton told the New York Times in an interview published Monday. “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have.”
Hinton, often referred to as “the Godfather of A.I.,” spent years in academia before joining Google in 2013 when it bought his company for $44 million. He told the Times Google has been a “proper steward” for how A.I. tech should be deployed and that the tech giant has acted responsibly for its part. But he left the company in May so that he can speak freely about “the dangers of A.I.”
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PBS: “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton Warns of the
“Existential Threat” of AI| Amanpour and Company
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https://futurism.com/the-byte/stanford-ai-scientists-frontal-cortex-underdeveloped
~
AI researchers are more like late-stage teenagers,” Reich told Esquire, comparing those in the still-very-much-developing field of AI to those in more established, similarly ethics-concerned biomedical tech.
“They’re newly aware of their power in the world, but their frontal cortex is massively underdeveloped.”
“Their [sense of] social responsibility,” he added, “as a consequence is not so great.” Gotta say: damn.
…
[ The relative comparison might remotely be so — only serves to be more extremely alarming than he even thought he could convey, himself, as the biotech world has been seeking and receiving immunity from consequences blowing back upon themselves at least.]
Teenage Invincibility Honestly, when you think about it, it’s a pretty solid analogy. For one thing, teens are often risk-happy thrill-seekers, and folks who work in AI — particularly the younger crowd — are constantly talking about how the unregulated technology that they’re building might annihilate humanity. But as their risk aversion generally seems to hover right around zero, they keep building the technology regardless.
~
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