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   Whitney (writerethink@wandering.shop)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Mar-2023 16:58:06 JST Whitney

   I've been experimenting with GPTZero, which claims to be able to identify whether text was produced by an LLM or a human.

   Everything I know about how LLMs work and how humans produce language (I know a non-trivial amount about both, given my background in computational linguistics and psycholinguistics) tells me that you will never, ever be able to build something that can reliably distinguish between the two. And sure enough, GPTZero fails miserably. So many false positives.

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     Whitney (writerethink@wandering.shop)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Mar-2023 16:58:07 JST Whitney

     in reply to

     My brain wouldn't let go of this, so I now have a nearly 5k-word essayish thing expanding on this thread, and I don't know what to do with it - do I post it to Medium? Do I rework it to submit to a journal, and if so, which one? Make it an OER somehow? I dunno, but if anyone wants to read almost 5k words about why AI-detection is a fool's errand likely to disproportionately harm marginalized students, here you go: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CXgsYD-Sk-FqrbiaK2XeRwgRK56RG7-1rX2DDMV0JAA/edit?usp=sharing

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     Whitney (writerethink@wandering.shop)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Mar-2023 16:58:25 JST Whitney

     in reply to

     As a writing prof, I’ve been making this point as forcefully as I can in as many contexts as I can, because I have seen too many people uncritically accepting the hype - in both directions, about the capabilities of LLMs and about the abilities of automated detectors - and my biggest concern is that schools will decide to use automated detectors and put their students through “reverse Turing Tests”.

     pettter repeated this.
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     Whitney (writerethink@wandering.shop)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Mar-2023 16:58:25 JST Whitney

     in reply to

     And I know that the students that will be hit hardest are the ones we already police the most: the ones who we think “shouldn’t” be able to produce clear, clean prose. The non-native speakers. The speakers of marginalized dialects. So I’ve been pushing against every suggestion that we should adopt these tools.