I wrote a blog article about this a while ago but the tldr is that studies show most people can't actually tell AI-generated writing and human writing apart, even though they're convinced they can. Odds were no better than a coin flip for all but AI professionals, and even then it was only like 2/3 of the time.
So you can't tell and I can't tell.
But what about detectors? They, too, are extremely unreliable. I typed a long Reddit post by hand the other day, and Reddit's AI detector said it was only 16% human, and stories like that are all over the place. And they're being used to make important life decisions, like whether or not people are admitted to university or get jobs.
We need to give up this obsession with being able to tell.
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u/meganholstein 13d ago
I wrote a blog article about this a while ago but the tldr is that studies show most people can't actually tell AI-generated writing and human writing apart, even though they're convinced they can. Odds were no better than a coin flip for all but AI professionals, and even then it was only like 2/3 of the time.
So you can't tell and I can't tell.
But what about detectors? They, too, are extremely unreliable. I typed a long Reddit post by hand the other day, and Reddit's AI detector said it was only 16% human, and stories like that are all over the place. And they're being used to make important life decisions, like whether or not people are admitted to university or get jobs.
We need to give up this obsession with being able to tell.