Frankly, I’d say it shows precisely the opposite. “New media” assessed your “analysis” as “some rando online thinks something is AI generated, runs it through an ‘AI detector’ which turns up positive, and posts about it. There are lots of these all the time, so that’s entirely unremarkable by itself. Is the guy famous in some way? No, not particularly. Are impactful media outlets picking it up? No, at least not yet. This is not a story for us.”
Whereas traditional media outlets go something like “Okay, so the Pope just posted something, and we need to write about it. Let’s see how people online are reacting … hmm, some guy is speculating it might be written by AI? That’ll get us clicks! Oh, and he’s using Pangram, which is peer-reviewed, so it’s Science! Great, publish.”
epistemically rigorous and systematic case
Okay.
My own takeaway from your story getting traction has been to tell people that Pangram seems to now be prominent enough that they should run their writing through it and see if it gets flagged, and if it does, get some LLM to generate a few variants until it doesn’t anymore.
My own takeaway from your story getting traction has been to tell people that Pangram seems to now be prominent enough that they should run their writing through it and see if it gets flagged, and if it does, get some LLM to generate a few variants until it doesn’t anymore.
This just seems straight-up antisocial, borderline evil. Why do you hate good things?
I considered that explanation, but given how low Pangram’s false positive rates are, it seems unlikely that Shankar knows multiple people in that position. Seems much more likely that the default effect of this advice is to get people to repeatedly try their AI-generated writing against Pangram.
I’d answer to that description. I aspire to live by the maxim, “I may quarrel with my brother, we may quarrel with our cousins, but it’s family together against the world,” and I agree by most reasonable definitions, my explicit rejection of any imputed obligation to act against my friends and family for the benefit of broader society would be antisocial. I simply hold (personal) loyalty to be a higher principle, and in this case, even granting the premise that this works as well as claimed, yes, I indeed prefer to warn my friends and colleagues of a trap they may not have seen to letting them fall in either as intended target or acceptable collateral of your “good things,” which you’ll note continue to work only imperceptibly less well from your perspective, ineffective (or at least, so I hope) only against the negligibly small group who heed my warning and take my advice.
borderline evil
I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on how conventional morality is typically reckoned – I find it an incoherent mess of ad hoc justifications with no consistent principles – but on this, I’d wager a significant fraction of people agree with me.
Frankly, I’d say it shows precisely the opposite. “New media” assessed your “analysis” as “some rando online thinks something is AI generated, runs it through an ‘AI detector’ which turns up positive, and posts about it. There are lots of these all the time, so that’s entirely unremarkable by itself. Is the guy famous in some way? No, not particularly. Are impactful media outlets picking it up? No, at least not yet. This is not a story for us.”
Whereas traditional media outlets go something like “Okay, so the Pope just posted something, and we need to write about it. Let’s see how people online are reacting … hmm, some guy is speculating it might be written by AI? That’ll get us clicks! Oh, and he’s using Pangram, which is peer-reviewed, so it’s Science! Great, publish.”
Okay.
My own takeaway from your story getting traction has been to tell people that Pangram seems to now be prominent enough that they should run their writing through it and see if it gets flagged, and if it does, get some LLM to generate a few variants until it doesn’t anymore.
(I didn’t downvote)
This just seems straight-up antisocial, borderline evil. Why do you hate good things?
I think he means “their legitimately self-authored writing”, not “their ai-generated writing”.
I considered that explanation, but given how low Pangram’s false positive rates are, it seems unlikely that Shankar knows multiple people in that position. Seems much more likely that the default effect of this advice is to get people to repeatedly try their AI-generated writing against Pangram.
I’d answer to that description. I aspire to live by the maxim, “I may quarrel with my brother, we may quarrel with our cousins, but it’s family together against the world,” and I agree by most reasonable definitions, my explicit rejection of any imputed obligation to act against my friends and family for the benefit of broader society would be antisocial. I simply hold (personal) loyalty to be a higher principle, and in this case, even granting the premise that this works as well as claimed, yes, I indeed prefer to warn my friends and colleagues of a trap they may not have seen to letting them fall in either as intended target or acceptable collateral of your “good things,” which you’ll note continue to work only imperceptibly less well from your perspective, ineffective (or at least, so I hope) only against the negligibly small group who heed my warning and take my advice.
I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on how conventional morality is typically reckoned – I find it an incoherent mess of ad hoc justifications with no consistent principles – but on this, I’d wager a significant fraction of people agree with me.
Do you also actively go out of your way to recommend your friends and family cheat in general?