261
Why AI detectors think the US Constitution was written by AI
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It will almost always be detectable if you just read what is written. Especially for academic work. It doesn't know what a citation is, only what one looks like and where they appear. It can't summarise a paper accurately. It's easy to force laughably bad output by just asking the right sort of question.
The simplest approach for setting homework is to give them the LLM output and get them to check it for errors and omissions. LLMs can't critique their own work and students probably learn more from chasing down errors than filling a blank sheet of paper for the sake of it.
What you are describing is true of older LLMs. GPT4, it's less true of. GPT5 or whatever it is they are training now will likely begin to shed these issues.
The shocking thing that we discovered that lead to all of this is that this sort of LLM continues to scale in capabilities with the quality and size of the training set. AI researchers were convinced that this was not possible until GPT proved that it was.
So the idea that you can look at the limitations of the current generation of LLM and make blanket statements about the limitations of all future generations is demonstrably flawed.
They cannot be anything other than stochastic parrots because that is all the technology allows them to be. They are not intelligent, they don't understand the question you ask or the answer they give you, they don't know what truth is let alone how to determine it. They're just good at producing answers that sound like a human might have written them. They're a parlour trick. Hi-tech magic 8balls.
Are you referring to humans or AI? I'm not sure you're wrong about humans...
FFS
Sam Altman is a know-nothing grifter. HTH
Have you even read the article?
IMO it does not do a good job of disproving that "humans are stochastic parrots".
The example with the octopus isn't really about stochastic parrots. It's more about how LLMs are not multi-modal.
That article is super helpful.
Thanks!