[HN Gopher] Why do we all fall for AI-generated language? ___________________________________________________________________ Why do we all fall for AI-generated language? Author : azhenley Score : 73 points Date : 2022-06-18 15:28 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (twitter.com) (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com) | FatalLogic wrote: | Bceuase we asmsume poeple are tyring to mkae snense | ummonk wrote: | This is why it's important that the Turing test is adversarial | and done with a human control. I see way too many people (even | some smart engineers) reading AI-generated writing that looks | human and declaring that the AI passed the Turing test. | nonrandomstring wrote: | I had to mark about 100 end of term essays written by Indian | students for a British university. My unwritten instructions are | not to take language into account much. I must attend mainly to | the technical content. | | At least half were written in what I took to be an authentic | voice but with such bad grammar and spelling as to render them | barely readable. Some had clearly been mangled in a laundromat of | Google translate from Hinglish via Mongolian and Swahili. They | contained bizarre phrases and comical statements. Many more were | obviously written by some kind of generator and fudged until they | read well enough. | | Since the student handbook states the threshold for academic | "plagiarism" is above 20 percent perhaps unsurprisingly the | Turnitin (an awful tool) score for almost every essays was just | below 20 percent. An interesting clustering! | | Students who cheat have a formidable array of tools now, not just | GPT but automatic re-writers and scripts to test against Turnitin | until it passes. | | Add to this problem that my time for marking is not paid extra, | is squeezed tighter every semester, and that students are given | endless concessions to boost their "experience". The handbook | also says that if they fail, no worries, they get to try again, | and again, and again... and I am sure if I actually stuck to my | guns and failed every single student I'd be fired. | | As I wrote in the Times last year, I think the technological arms | race against GPT (and the economic conditions that mean it's | used) cannot be won with the time and resources available to | ordinary human teachers. | [deleted] | User23 wrote: | > As I wrote in the Times last year, I think the technological | arms race against GPT (and the economic conditions that mean | it's used) cannot be won with the time and resources available | to ordinary human teachers | | Based on the rest of your post, there appears to be a stronger | case that your students are setting a rather low bar for GPT to | stumble over. It's unfortunate that there are so many cultures | where widespread cheating is condoned, if not outright | encouraged. They may be able to fool their teachers, but how | much comfort will that be when the bridges are collapsing, the | pipelines are exploding, the wind turbines are breaking apart, | and all the other activities that ultimately report to reality | and not some human superior who can be bluffed become | impossible to continue? | nonrandomstring wrote: | > It's unfortunate that there are so many cultures where | widespread cheating is condoned, if not outright encouraged. | They may be able to fool their teachers, but how much comfort | will that be when the bridges are collapsing, the pipelines | are exploding, the wind turbines are breaking apart, and all | the other activities that ultimately report to reality and | not some human superior who can be bluffed become impossible | to continue? | | You're so right. But let me add some other feelings, so as | not to sound like a racist or that British universities are | some "great white hope" to overseas students. This had little | to do with them being Indian. It's a generational thing. In | all cultures we teach young people to game systems. Right | from the get go they learn that if they can buy powerful | tools, systems and access then that's fair game. They're just | doing what they've been rewarded for their whole lives and | want to make a better life. To them it's not cheating. I am | the anachronistic throwback here I think. | schroeding wrote: | > My unwritten instructions are not to take language into | account much. I must attend mainly to the technical content. | | Interesting, at my non-English, run-off-the-mill university | there were modules / seminars in CompSci where large amounts of | language errors in essays (even if written in English, a non- | native language for the majority of staff and students) could | ruin the grade. ^^ | gs17 wrote: | My undergrad even had a "banned error list", which would get | you kicked down half a grade on any paper. | matkoniecz wrote: | > cannot be won with the time and resources available to | ordinary human teachers | | By your description it clearly appears that whoever manages | your company[1] is not actually interested in detecting | cheating. | | What you describe could be easily combated by giving teachers | ability to fail blatant cheaters. | | [1]At this point it is hard to pretend that it is university | nonrandomstring wrote: | I agree with every word you say. | matkoniecz wrote: | In such case it seems that GPT-3 main effect is to make | eroding standards easier. As while rules are not changed, | cheaters can put less work to pass it by cheating than | before. | | So standards can be lowered while pretending (for now) that | it has not happened. | milkey_mouse wrote: | > automatic re-writers and scripts to test against Turnitin | until it passes | | Like an ad-hoc GAN where Turnitin is the discriminator. | Interesting. | RicoElectrico wrote: | What major was it? | nonrandomstring wrote: | I can't say. That would identify the students and that's | unfair. | | But, a technical subject that could be assessed in other, | better ways [1], and for which written essays are rather easy | to template and do keyword bingo to get a bare pass. | | [1] Making the professor read 100 essays is a cheap option. | RicoElectrico wrote: | Yeah, in my EE major I never really had to write an essay. | I have no idea why English/USA universities are fixated on | them (or so it seems based on comments from the internet). | Lab/project reports, seminar talks - I did these instead. | User23 wrote: | Humans have a powerful tendency to ascribe human characteristics | to inanimate objects, including computers. It's a kind of variant | of the Pathetic Fallacy[1], except for artifacts instead of | natural objects. The intelligence of an artificial intelligence | is as real as the characters in our dreams. It's a construct of | our own consciousnesses. That doesn't mean it should be | discounted though. Our consciousnesses can do a lot and finding | artificial ways to stimulate them is powerful to say the least. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy | mproud wrote: | A tweet no doubt generated by an AI. | krisoft wrote: | It is such a weird question. People fall for AI-generated | language because the goal of the people who made the generator | was to create language like a human would. | | Do people wonder why scissors cut paper? Because that is what | they were made for! | | If the AI wouldn't fool the humans the researchers would be | honing it more. Same way if we couldn't make paper cutting | scissors there would be people trying to make one. | | Am I missing the point here? | readams wrote: | I think you're missing the point. The question could be | possibly rephrased as "what are the tricks that the AI uses to | fool humans?" The paper goes on to identify some of the | specific tricks that the AIs appear to use. A related question | might be "why are we fooled by such simple tricks?" | FFRefresh wrote: | If you follow that question through and think through the | implications, it paints potentially a dark future for digital | communication. | | The 'tricks' AI uses are also 'tricks' that humans use in | everyday conversation, we just don't call them 'tricks' when | humans are involved. If we start assuming that first-person | pronoun usage, mentions of family, etc. are potential signals | of AI, then I don't see how we don't end up in a state where | increased dehumanization occurs. | dustingetz wrote: | why do we assume that humans are smart? answer: ego; | corollary: we are not | lofatdairy wrote: | The reason why this is interesting isn't because humans are | smart, but the assumption that human fallibility is both | predictable and worth investigating (a supposition I'm | inclined to agree with). | | Even if humans are easy to fool (though the fact that we're | just now achieving this on a generalized scale after at | least 80 years of theorizing seems to contradict this), | humans being fooled can result in significant enough | impacts where we should still investigate the degree to | which they can be tricked, and what methods of discerning | are available to us. | MathYouF wrote: | We seem obviously to be the smartest living things in the | universe we know of. | | We're also approximately the dumbest possible things that | could construct the society and technology we have (if we | weren't, we would've done it sooner). | | I agree that some humility of our own intellect as primates | would do us a lot of good in the coming age of AI. | jacquesm wrote: | > We seem obviously to be the smartest living things in | the universe we know of. | | Humblest too. | lalopalota wrote: | s/We /A few of us/ | dustingetz wrote: | civilization was not constructed, it evolved, like our | biological bodies | ben_w wrote: | I'd say it gets more constructed and less evolved the | further up the hierarchy of civilisation we get. A | merchant of 1320 had relatively few laws to contend with, | a corner shop in 2020 could not function without many | layers of engineered rules for the people who provide | them with the services they are themselves required to | use due to other engineered rules for the benefit of | their customers. | MathYouF wrote: | This makes me wonder what laws and tedium of | administration merchants of the 1320's would complain | about. I'm sure they still had a few depending on the | region, and maybe more severe possible outcomes (highway | robbery, unlawful arrest because of the influence of a | rival merchant, arbitrary taxation and tariffs, etc.). | ben_w wrote: | Yup. I think also languages were much more variable, and | doing accounting in Roman numerals was so hard they did | it twice and averaged the answers, and contracts and tax | receipts were done by carving marks in sticks (hence, | apparently, the etymology of "stocks"). | dalbasal wrote: | Taking your point, the title should probably be " _How we | fall for AI-generated language._ " | synu wrote: | Researching semi-obvious things like what elements of AI- | generated text humans mistake for being human-generated is part | of the process of how people working on AIs work towards better | generation. You're just seeing how the sausage gets made. | mattnewton wrote: | Maybe a bit, they aren't just asking why scissors cut paper, | but also why we landed on that design. What about it makes it | ergonomic to hold and efficient, and more to the point, why | does being sharp cut it? | | In the language model case, why can we model language this way | so effectively and why does it follow these statistical | patterns? It turns out that maybe a major reason has something | to do with self description. | | This is also a more interesting question because we understand | language less than we understand cutting paper, and also | because the process humans used to design large language models | is more indirect and alien than traditional industrial design. | | My takeaway was that people reading language modeling a person | writing about themselves imagine it was written by a person, | more than text written by people not about themselves. That's | an interesting trick! Describing human experiences in language | makes people attribute the language to a human right now. Maybe | this will change after a generation of people knowing about | this, but that seems important to think about. | dvt wrote: | This is actually a pretty good comment. The scissor analogy, | while a bit on-the-nose, is very accurate. Maybe a better | example would be: why is our body fooled by artificial hearts? | Simply because it was built in such a way that it simulates a | real heart pretty well. | | Similarly, these models are built in such a way that they | simulate real-life conversations pretty well. There's nothing | really more to it. In my view, this phenomenon has nothing to | do with intelligence or how smart we are, or whatever. | ineedasername wrote: | Lot's of people don't write all that well. A little disorganized, | awkward phrasing, run on sentences. If AI does a better job than | even 10% of the population then of course there's going to be a | sizeable amount of miscategorizing when asking humans to classify | writing as computer or human generated. | | You could probably use a corpus of purely human writing and have | people attribute a decent portion to computer generated. | | Asking why AI writing can fool humans is a bit like asking why a | computer is better at many tasks often performed by humans. | akagusu wrote: | My question is when government will obligate companies to | identify and label AI generated content so people can distinguish | it from human generated content? | legrande wrote: | We fall for it because although language is a powerful tool, it's | incredibly bad at conveying nuance, context, and describing | phenomenons present in nature. Poetry comes close, but still | doesn't hit the spot, and leaves out so much detail, no matter | how well written or verbose in its descriptions. Our own mind has | to fill in the blanks of a well written description. Language | also can't express the ineffable or the divine. It can hint at | it, but it won't transmit the phenomenon correctly into another | mind. | schroeding wrote: | From the pre-print paper[1]: | | > ... we believe the next generation of language models must be | designed not to undermine human intuition | | Right, but isn't a major reason why we build these huge language | models to replace _actual_ humans in e.g. Level 1 support with | chatbots? Almost all chatbots I used in the past (and most were | not even ML based, someone programmed this in) were weirdly | personal and tried to be non-robotic, with jokes and human-like | reactions to inputs like "Thanks!". | | Taking a look at some projects that used GPT-3[2], many try to | imitate humans. For some, like Replika.ai, the whole "being | human" thing is their entire schtick. | | There is obviously a market for text completion AIs that imitate | humans, so it's doubtful that we'll get this toothpaste back into | the tube, IMO. | | [1] https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2206/2206.07271.pdf [2] | https://medium.com/letavc/apps-and-startups-powered-by-gpt-3... | (caution, 2020) | trqwerty wrote: | Most of these AI vs. human tests take very poor or weird looking | human creations vs. the best AI creations. No wonder that one | gets the desired results. | tlhunter wrote: | I wonder if this spells out the downfall of social media? Or at | least non-verified users on social media? As time goes on we'll | have larger and larger armies of bots spewing automated political | rhetoric everywhere. | jokethrowaway wrote: | I think I'll start running my copy through gpt3 to make it more | human | matkoniecz wrote: | Maybe it would be interesting to read if presented as an article, | but the Twitter thread is unreadable. | pharrington wrote: | Their preprint is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07271 | legrande wrote: | https://nitter.net/maurice_jks/status/1537814372462039043 | matkoniecz wrote: | oh, that is much better - I survived long enough to notice | link to their paper. | | Thanks! | [deleted] | hourago wrote: | I totally agree. I understand that people do not blog anymore. | But Twitter is not a good place for lengthy texts, by design! | hourago wrote: | Real people does not always speak good. | | And everybody has blinds pots, topics that are interesting but | that we have little knowledge. | | > We show that human judgments of AI-generated language are | handicapped by intuitive but flawed heuristics such as | associating first-person pronouns, authentic words, or family | topics with humanity. | | And that is a good one. Because we try to understand the others | when they does not make fully sense. | andyjohnson0 wrote: | Because secretly we know that our own consciousness is just a | model watching its own outputs too. | midjji wrote: | Because its not responsive/dialogue. | secondcoming wrote: | Is it the case for all languages, or just English? | | Native English speakers are typically used to interacting with | people whose native language isn't English and so easily tolerate | errors or odd word choice. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-06-18 23:00 UTC)