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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.
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.
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.
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-
https://rentry.co/oo4qkduk
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.
With apologies to Descartes, "always has been". While cogito, ergo sum manages to demonstrate that I exist to myself (at least, I find the argument compelling), I've never been able to satisfactorily prove that the rest of the world and everyone else as I perceive it exists, and isn't some
big simulationdemonic manifestations or imagination.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.
I suppose that this is a reminder that psychotic people who believe X are not just like regular people who believe things. If there was such a thing as an actual walking dead person who had sound reasoning for knowing he is that, he could ask you if the drugs had been tested on any dead people, and besides, why did you say they had a completely different purpose less than five minutes ago?
A day in a psych ward will disabuse you of the notion that there's a bright line between sanity and insanity.
Just to start, we have distinctions between a true delusion, a fixed belief and an overvalued idea. Said distinction is incredibly subjective and often artificial.
The overvalued idea is the most familiar. Someone becomes absolutely convinced their neighbor is sabotaging their career, or that 5G towers are causing their migraines. The belief is wrong, probably, and they hold it with more intensity than the evidence warrants.
However: if you corner them and argue carefully enough, they squirm a little. They might say "well, I suppose I could be wrong, but..." There is still some kind of cognitive negotiation happening. The belief is upstream of their reasoning, but their reasoning is not entirely offline. Lots of people you know have overvalued ideas. You might have some. I might have some. Most of the time, they're like the mites that live on your skin, not beneficial, but not so debilitating you'll inevitably run face first into the consequences of your poorly founded beliefs.
The fixed false belief turns the dial up. Now there is no squirming. The person is simply certain. A deeply depressed patient knows, with the same confidence you know your own name, that they are a fundamentally evil person who has ruined everyone around them. You cannot argue them out of it because it does not feel like a belief to them - it feels like a perception, like reporting what they can plainly see. The fixedness is the thing. Evidence just bounces off.
I emphasize false fixed belief, because you might well believe that you have 5 fingers per hand. Someone might show up and make a really convincing argument to the contrary. Maybe they claim to show that Peano arithmetic is flawed, or that you have somehow grossly misunderstood what the number 5 means, or what counts as a finger. You are unlikely to give a shit, and for good reason.
(There are the usual "proofs" that pi is equal to 4, or that 1=2. The mathematically unsophisticated might never be able to find out the logical error, but they usually do not actually end up convinced.)
The true delusion (what Karl Jaspers called the primary delusion) is something stranger still. It is not just a fixed false belief. It has a particular quality of being un-understandable from the inside out. A man wakes up one morning and suddenly knows, with crystalline certainty, that he has been chosen to decode messages hidden in highway signs. There is no paranoid personality that led here, no trauma that makes it psychologically legible. It arrived fully formed, like a piece of foreign software running on his brain.
(Look up autochtonic delusions for more)
Psychiatrists following Jaspers say you can't empathize your way into it. You can understand a depressed person thinking they're worthless, but you cannot really follow the phenomenological path to "the license plates are speaking to me specifically."
Other than that, delusions are completely immune to evidence, and also culturally incongruent. Put a pin in that till I come back to it, it's very important.
The clinical rule of thumb: overvalued ideas yield under pressure, fixed beliefs are immovable but emotionally coherent, and true delusions feel less like conclusions the person reached and more like axioms that were simply installed.
You know, I tried my hand at writing a few Koans about psychiatry a while back. I might as well share one I'm fond of:
A patient who had recovered from psychosis came to Master Dongshan and said, "For two years I believed the government had implanted a transmitter in my skull. I was as certain of this as I am now certain it was a delusion. The feeling of knowing was identical in both cases. How am I to trust any of my beliefs ever again?"
Master Dongshan said, "You are asking perhaps the most important question in all of epistemology, and I notice you arrived at it not through philosophy but through suffering."
The patient said, "True enough, but forgive me for not finding your statement very helpful."
Master Dongshan said, "No. That's why you paid me to prescribe you meds, not for a lecture on philosophy. But consider: everyone around you walks through life with that same unjustified feeling of certainty. They've just never been given reason to doubt it. You now know something that most people do not. You know that the experience of being right and the fact of being right are completely different things."
The patient said, "I have.... issues with framing this as some kind of gift. It feels more like a nightmare. I can no longer trust my own experience."
Master Dongshan said, "You have described the starting point of all genuine inquiry. Most people never reach it. They are too comfortable inside the feeling of knowing to notice it is only a feeling."
The patient was not comforted, but was, in a way he found no use for, enlightened.
Okay. You can take the pin out now.
Notice the emphasis on culture context. If you've ever mindlessly scrolled TikTok or Insta reels, you might have seen a "prank" where this second-gen Nigerian citizen in the UK follows random older first-gen immigrants, introduces himself, then declares that "he was sent from Nigeria to kill you."
He then makes some weird gesture with his hands, takes out a pinch of salt from his pocket and throws it at the victim. They immediately panic, though the response varies from running away screaming, running at him screaming with the intent to do bodily harm, or to pull out a Bible and chant verses while weeping.
(Hardly a once-off. It seems a concerningly large number of elderly Nigerians carry a convenient pocket Bible for such occasions)
He doesn't pull out a knife, he's unfailingly polite, he just throws salt at them, which I'm given to believe is supposed to represent some kind of black magic curse.
Can a pinch of salt hurt you? Not unless you're a slug.
You might feel like laughing at these silly, superstitious fools. Haha, they think witch doctors can hurt them!
If you (for a general you) are a Christian, or any other religious denomination, you are exactly as laughably deluded from my perspective. You hold what, to me, is a clearly unfounded belief that is immune to updating on empirical evidence. That saint who rolled their eyes and spoke in tongues? You don't see people getting beatified for that these days, after we've got EEGs and research on temporal lobe epilepsy.
Unfortunately, if we used this perfectly reasonable standard for insanity, the patients in the psych ward would outnumber those outside. Grudgingly, we keep track of whether the delusions you hold are common, especially for your cultural milieu, and whether they are causing you disproportionate harm. Also, can we do anything about it? Is there a drug I can give some deeply religious pensioner that'll stop them from believing in God? Not that I'm aware of. If they're peeling off their skin to get at the hidden chip inserted by MI6, then I at least have some hope that risperidone will help.
Wait till you see the nonsense involved with evaluating delusional disorder. Othello syndrome involves feelings of immense jealousy and suspicion that your partner is cheating on you, based on little evidence. Simple enough?
And then you see someone who has a seemingly sweet, loving and faithful wife, who gets diagnosed with Othello syndrome, and then discover that said wife was actually cheating on them all along. It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.
How the fuck is a psychiatrist supposed to know for sure? We simply persevere, and it mostly works. When it doesn't, it makes the papers and we get served lawsuits.
If someone has Othello syndrome and makes their partner so annoyed that they end up cheating, does that retroactively invalidate the diagnosis? You can tell me, after you find a time machine. I'm sure plenty of philosophers have made a living writing about Gettier cases, but I'm not a professional philosopher, and I don't let philosophy get in the way of fixing people.
If the Christian delusion increases social cooperation and buffers against social stressors, then it decreases the sum total delusion in a civilization and protects against those delusions which are acutely harmful to individual and collective wellbeing. A Noble
LieDelusion, if you will, necessary for any society that is serious about ameliorating suffering, which is the ultimate aim of the medical profession and possibly humanity itself (anything else is just collecting useless information, and there are now video games for that). Maybe one day, in a more enlightened era, doctors will prescribe medicinal midnight masses and meditations on the Love of God to treat the world-weary.See, I know plenty of ways to improve wellbeing that do not necessitate believing in clearly false things. Not social fictions, not coordination schema, I mean believing in claims that are, as far as I can tell, factually incorrect.
Moreover, I think that the cognitive distortions and irrational decision making induced by religious belief has deleterious longterm consequences. Science, technology and empiricism also make our lives better without having to believe in false propositions. If there was a pill that made me happier at the cost of becoming irrational, I wouldn't take it unless the tradeoff was very favorable. I would rather be sane and sad than happy in delusion.
Organized religion, specifically the institutional kind with the lobbying arms and the political coalitions, has repeatedly and successfully obstructed things like embryonic stem cell research, IVF access, gene therapy trials, and HPV vaccination uptake. These aren't edge cases - these are tractable causes of preventable suffering that got derailed because a sufficiently large number of people believe things that aren't true about ensoulment and the sanctity of gametes. The wellbeing benefits of religious belief, to the extent they're real, accrue mostly to the believer. The costs of organized religious epistemology are frequently externalized onto people who never opted into the belief system. And those costs are significant.
I think even basic utilitarian calculus would demonstrate that it is absolutely worth bulldozing the religious edifice when honestly accounting for the lost potential.
The juice is not worth the squeeze. I will not drink the Kool-aid.
I haven’t noticed any treatment or social movement develop which shows the ability to mitigate social stress and drug use while reducing the risk of early life adversity like religion. And these are the big cofactors for psychosis. So the science-y things which increase wellbeing probably won’t help the demoniac as well as as Jesus.
But there are religious people at the forefront of science and technology. If you want to maximize for science, you need more than rationality. You also need to maximize for (1) social cooperation and trust, (2) honesty, (3) general prosperity, and (4) status-free interest. Atheism is hamful here. Religion is helpful. You want to know that the research you’re reading isn’t wholecloth invented by some status-obsessed person who does not engage in any prosocial ritual. This is necessary for science to progress. Perhaps someone can use AI to check the religious practices of the worst “science defectors” in recent memory; perhaps I am wrong. But religion uniquely reinforces intrinsically honest behavior through the cultivation of unquestioning belief. (Other rituals can plausibly do this, like Maoism, but they do not currently exist). And a fictive belief will always be stronger and recruit more of a person’s interest and commitment than an empirical belief.
But you win no extra points for doing so; all mortal flesh will be turned to dust and forgotten forever.
It is very beneficial for an atheist to be surrounded by theists who are +1 in the trustworthy, cooperative, industrious, selfless, and rule-following skill tree. In this sense, the atheist is a free-rider, because only the theist is sacrificing some % of his self-concern on the altar of civic beneficence. The atheist gets to self-benefit-maxx while making fun of the silly theist, but he doesn’t thank the theist when the cashier is particularly polite, or when the nurse shows more love when you’re hurt, or when you didn’t get into a car accident by a high driver. The Invisible God brings myriad invisible benefits to those with eyes to see them.
Denmark and Sweden are among Europe's least highly religious countries by Pew's 2018 typology, yet the Nordic countries continue to place near the top of global wellbeing rankings. That doesn't prove secularity causes better mental health. It does undercut any simple story that widespread disbelief is socially catastrophic.
"Religious people are at the forefront of science." Okay. Also, a Pew survey of AAAS scientists found 33% believe in God, 18% in a higher power, and 41% in neither, which is already substantially less religious than the general population. If you want the sharper number, Larson and Witham's survey of National Academy of Sciences members found roughly 92% rejected belief in God or a higher power. Individual religious scientists exist, obviously. Mendel was a friar, Collins ran the NIH. But that's the exception being abused to do the work of a rule.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/
If being smarter and more scientifically capable makes you less religious, or vice versa, that is really not a point in favor.
More to the point: "religion uniquely reinforces honest behavior through the cultivation of unquestioning belief." I want you to sit with that sentence and poke at it for a bit. You have just identified the exact mechanism I object to - unquestioning belief - and presented it as a feature. That same cognitive substrate is what has driven documented obstruction of embryonic stem-cell research, explicit Catholic institutional opposition to IVF, and religiously motivated vaccine hesitancy in certain communities.
You can't neatly extract "unquestioning belief makes people cooperative and honest" while quarantining "unquestioning belief obstructs gene therapy trials." It's the same cognitive operation applied to different objects. To the extent that religious belief is not incompatible with leading a normal life, that is by virtue of the remarkable human ability to compartmentalize and ignore the annoying ramifications of their "sincere" beliefs.
The free-rider argument proves too much, and you've already spotted this. you mentioned Maoism in the same breath. Any sufficiently coercive ideology with strong ingroup enforcement produces cooperative, rule-following, trust-generating behavior. That's a point in favor of strong social institutions generally, not religion specifically. You're essentially arguing: "false beliefs that produce prosocial behavior are net positive." Fine. Then show me that religion is the uniquely optimal vehicle, not merely the incumbent with path-dependent lock-in. You haven't shown that. I doubt you can show that.
Give me a few tens of billions of dollars (that's pocket change), and I promise I will likely find a way to make humans more pro-social through merely physical interventions. Give me a few hundred billion (now we're talking about real money) and I'll stake my head on it.
I'm not collecting points. I'm trying to have accurate beliefs about the world. An epistemically broken tool is a broken tool regardless of whether using it feels good. If I'm wrong about something, I want to know. You're describing a pill that makes me feel better by making me systematically worse at determining what is true. I've already told you I wouldn't take that pill unless the tradeoff was very, very favorable. You have not demonstrated the tradeoff is favorable. What. You have done is demonstrated that the incumbent system has measurable benefits while largely declining to engage with the costs I enumerated.
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