How do the websites which detect ChatGPT etc do it? They are very reliable.
Re language patterns, the standard defence is to write very little. On say 30 words you can’t do much, unless a rare phrase is involved (search for “upper deck” – including the quotes and look at the first two hits). We’ve had people here doing funny stuff and they usually take care to write very little, especially when trying to be female (female writing is usually obvious).
choosing a “personality type” for written output is the next obvious thing.
It is technically quite doable to take a collection of text from someone and fine-tune a model to match that style. I actually should try to do it on my own text to see what comes out when I have some time and would be curious how it come out. If it works well (I believe it would) then someone with access to the post of someone else could probably replicate the style and fool the mods.
Forums will find it hard to deal with because human mods cost money
reversely, A LLM would likely do a very good job at checking the consistency of someone post with its history, maybe not an absolute check a post is from human, but a comparative check that the post is suspicious because not in the regular style.
I agree 100%.
The funny thing though is that given that the majority of the population (in any modern country) struggles with writing more than a few lines, we will see the rise of a sub-population whose entire written output is done by this software. It will be readily recognisable initially but maybe less so as time goes on. Already people can choose an avatar for an online community which they feel represents their personality (most of these look silly) and choosing a “personality type” for written output is the next obvious thing.
Forums will find it hard to deal with because human mods cost money. For example I know of one big UK site, huge advertising income, 30k posts per day, which has mods but they can’t read all the posts and instead rely on a “Report” button being pressed. The users of this site are probably super-active in this (because many of them have nothing better to do as well as being highly judgemental) but they probably won’t report ChatGTP type text – especially if this improves. So naturally the site will fill up with machine-generated crap. In turn, their activity and thus income will fall because “spicy” discussions generate far more activity than bland ones.
So, the mod/admin activity will need to shift towards checking signups and that is already how EuroGA works. More than 50% of signups are banned immediately (did 2 just now) but almost nobody (about 1 per year, not counting malicious posters who managed to get in) gets banned after that.
I wouldn’t go as far as saying the “market” wants this. Surely Google does, but for the people reading it, it really depends on who they are.
As far as I’m concerned, the lack of “character” is a big detriment to the content. Information delivered in a purely sleek and streamlined way is much less interesting, there is no “feeling”, no rough edges, and practically no expressivity.
A cousin has a nice side-job writing essays up to masters level. He says it’s a mechanical process, simply repeating select parts of a narrow set of information in a predetermined format. He is clearly intelligent, but he says with practice anyone (or a machine) could do it.
I was recently doing SEO with my web designer, which recommends using AI to rewrite content. I can see it improves badly-written text, but it also drags my highly literate efforts to the same generic dumbed-down level. I find it depressing the market ‘wants’ this, as it’s demonstrably less formal, precise, and informative. The obvious changes to a sample:
I’ve heard some schools add some bombshell white text in the middle of the subject (invisible to a human reader, but included when copy/pasting), that adds instructions that can derail the LLM or make it easier to identify in the essay.
dublinpilot wrote:
Presumably the answer is that after submission the student would be “interviewed” on the content. So they are asked to explain certain points or delve further in and clarify things. This would be an integral part of the results.
Yes, that’s exactly what we do.
Clearly that is not the case mostly otherwise there would be no market for the essays. I think humanities Masters at the 2nd tier “universities” are mostly essays. I have met people personally who had some humanities Masters and it was obvious it was fake. Having said that, I met someone 20 years ago who had a CS Masters from Milton Keynes and she was fake too. PhD is different.
Re forum posting, yes of course this is fine but obviously if you can’t speak English at all then the translation could be pretty useless and you won’t know. I get this at work quite a bit. Emails from customers not making sense.
An admin has a broad visibility of someone’s posting pattern and malicious posters stand out well. So I don’t see an issue. 99% of non UK people here could get ELP7 easily 
Airborne_Again wrote:
Yes, that’s becoming a real problem at universities.
Presumably the answer is that after submission the student would be “interviewed” on the content. So they are asked to explain certain points or delve further in and clarify things. This would be an integral part of the results.
This would quickly distil those who understood what they had written vs those who only copy and pasted it. And I suppose if you completely understand what you’ve written it doesn’t really matter if you’ve copied and pasted it or not!
roznet wrote:
What do you think of using ChatGPT for editing a post? For those of us not great at English? Not that I really have, but just curious, seems a valid use to me.
It’s very useful. You can ask a LLM for a translation or rephrasing. I can’t speak for forum rules, but I would definitely expect you to make adjustments after the fact and check that it’s phrased correctly to mean what you intend (which means it’s not a pure copy / paste containing nonsense). If it’s a pure (automatic) translation, you can also mention it at the beginning.
Your following generated posts still sound like corporate BS to me (mainly because there are no language shortcuts)
I think the best way to use LLMs for phrasing is to ask for suggestions and then reassemble the sentence yourself.
