self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
4hr ago
Laws that cannot be enforced are laws not worth drafting. If they had just said "entirely or mostly LLM written submissions are banned", then that would have exactly the same impact and outcome.
I don't know the reputation of the mods at HN, though I've never seen heard of egregiously bad behavior or serious complaints, which is at least a positive signal. Maybe they will try and be reasonable, I just don't think that even a reasonable effort will succeed at catching more than small fraction of the fish in the sea. It'll definitely result in a massive surge of flagging and spurious reporting, which has its own downsides.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
4hr ago
Thank you! That's what I recall.
PS: I'm able to confirm that that child was slated to have an EEG.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
4hr ago
Just a few days ago, I met a patient who was convinced that they did not, in fact, "exist". He believed himself to be a rotting corpse, and initially declined his antipsychotics on the grounds that a dead person had no need for medication (a valid argument, as opposed to a sound one).
After some debate, we decided to tell him that the drugs would prevent his "corpse" from decomposing and causing a stink that would inconvenience the rest of the ward. Pro-sociality intact, he found this a compelling argument, and swallowed them without any further fuss.
So no, not even "Cogito ergo sum" is foolproof. The universe, and the DSM, must account for even better fools.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5hr ago
There is no solution. There is no proof-of-work or proof-of-humanity that is not severely error prone, extremely laborious, or that avoids requiring some kind of totalitarian police state dedicated to monitoring every word written by a human, or every token outputted by every known LLM.
It can't be done, or at the very least it won't be done.
On Hacker News, it’s now so bad there's a new guideline, “don’t post generated/AI-edited comments”. Unfortunately, due to the extreme intellect of the average Hacker News commenter, it can be hard to distinguish their profound technological insights from even a markov chain trained on buzzwords. Indeed, looking at top threads I still notice lots of slop-like posts from brand new or previously inactive accounts, like this one. I've been sarcastic, but I really like Hacker News, and hope it finds a way to stop the slop.
HN is the best parody of HN. There are plenty of (almost certainly human) users who could be trivially reconstructed by telling an LLM to write in the style of the biggest grognard pedant with arboreal-reinforcement of the anus it can envision.
Their attempt to ban "AI-edited" submissions is laughable, an attempt to close the barn-door after the horse was taken out back, shot, and then rendered into glue. There is no way to tell, distinguishing entirely AI written text is hard enough, let alone attempting to differentiate between an essay that was entirely human written, and one that took a human draft and then passed it through an LLM.
I intend to munch popcorn and observe the fallout. In all likelihood, a few egregious examples will be banned, alongside a witch-hunt that does more harm than good.
On the Motte, at least for now, I haven't seen any obvious bot posts. There were a couple AI-assisted posts (by "known" humans) over the past couple months that got called out.
The majority of bot posts (that anyone can tell are bot posts) are spam that is caught by the moderators and never see the light of day. I can't recall a single example of us allowing someone in who we thought was human, and then finding a smoking gun that would make us conclude that it was a bot all-along.
I am on record stating that I do not see an issue with LLM usage, as long as a human is willing to vouch for the results and has done their due diligence in terms of checking for errors or hallucinations. I do not make an effort to hide the fact that I regularly make use of LLMs myself when writing, though I restrict myself to using them to polish initial drafts, help with ideation, or for research purposes. This stance is, unfortunately, quite controversial. Nonetheless, my conscience remains clean, and I would have no objections to anyone else who acted the same way.
None of the tools that purport to identify AI-written text are very good. Pangram is the best of the pack (not that that means very much). I've tested, and while the false positive rate on 100% human writing (my own samples) is minimal, the false negative rate is significant. It will take essays that have non-negligible AI content and declare them 100% human, or substantially underestimate the AI contribution.
And that is with no particular effort to disguise or launder AI output as my own. If I actually cared, it would be easy as pie to take a 100% AI written work, then make small changes that would swing it to 100% human by Pangram's estimation (or prompt an LLM to do even that for me). The tools help with maximally lazy bad actors, but that is their limit. Eventually, they won't even catch said lazy bad actors.
Asking the LLMs? No good. Even worse.
I took an essay I wrote myself (the only AI involvement was proof-reading and feedback, most of which I ignored). Then I asked Claude Sonnet to summarize the content in 100 words, then to itself write a prompt that would be used by another LLM to attempt to reconstruct the original.
Summary (
90 words):A British-Indian psychiatry trainee, stranded in India due to flight disruptions, informally shadows their old hospital's outpatient psychiatry department out of boredom. They encounter chaotic conditions: nonexistent documentation, language barriers, and patients too poor to access consistent care. Notable cases include a dangerously over-medicated woman, a Bangladeshi medical tourist on a mystery drug nobody could identify, and a six-year-old with possible ADHD, seizures, or a genetic syndrome - nobody could tell. The author leaves impressed by the pace, nostalgic for the chaos, and still unable to diagnose the child.
Prompt:
Write a personal essay in a dry, sardonic first-person voice with a light literary register. A British-Indian psychiatry trainee, stranded in India due to flight disruptions, informally shadows their old hospital's outpatient psychiatry department out of boredom. They encounter chaotic conditions - nonexistent documentation and patients too poor to access consistent care. Notable cases include a dangerously over-medicated woman, a Bangladeshi medical tourist on an unidentified mystery drug, and a six-year-old with possible ADHD, seizures, or a genetic syndrome - no conclusion is reached. The author leaves nostalgic for the chaos and unable to diagnose the child.
I then asked fresh instances of Claude itself, as well as Gemini Pro, to write a new essay using the above as verbatim instruction.
I then took all 3 essays, put them in a single prompt, and then asked Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT Thinking to identify which ones were human, AI, or in-between.
You may see the results for yourself. Gemini's version of the essay was bad, and thus flagged by pretty much every model as either AI, or the "original" that was then expanded. The other two, including my own work, were usually deemed 100% human. Well, one is ~100% human, the other very much isn't.
Gemini in Fast mode:
https://g.co/gemini/share/0d4e6279bf8f
Gemini Pro:
https://g.co/gemini/share/119274d62e32
ChatGPT Thinking in Extended Reasoning mode:
https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69b3fad20c9c8191a27e3542685f20ba
Claude Sonnet with reasoning enabled:
I can't link directly, because the share option seems to dox me with no way of hiding my actual name.
Here's a dump instead-
Claude was the only one to correctly flag essay 3 as human, and that is likely only due to chance.
ChatGPT was the only model with memory enabled, and it failed miserably.
What else is there to say? Good luck and have fun while there's some hope of telling the bots apart from humans, if not humans using the bots.
I'm not claiming that there's zero value from making laws that are difficult to enforce.
Littering leaves litter. Cheating prior to LLMs? Easier to catch. There is far more clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing, or at least some kind of accessible physical evidence that can be used to adjust priors.
This is much harder when the standard is any use of an LLM at all. How do you know? How can you even find out, short of someone being incredibly sloppy or confessing?
It's closer, quantitatively and qualitatively, towards writing legislation against thought-crime without some kind of futuristic machine that can actually parse thoughts. You might have a law on the books saying it's illegal to jerk off while thinking of minors, but even if you catch someone with their pants down, they can just claim they envisioned Pamela Anderson. How can you tell?
Plenty of rules for the Motte hinge on subjective assessments by us mods. But it would be absurd to add one that says that you can't swear aloud after reading a comment from someone you don't like.
The worst part is that false accusations will run rampant. That increases moderation load, and that effort would be better spent elsewhere.
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