AI Detection
“You know, if I just hire a bunch of low-wage workers overseas to halve these documents for me, I could probably expand this service exponentially…”
– this fuckin’ AI, shortly before founding the biggest AI-powered AI detection company in the world
This whole whirlwind of AI developments over the past few years has been very disconcerting to me and has, silver-lining, inspired quite a few creative ideas in me that may show up in the future – expect this smug son-of-a-bot to make a few more appearances.
But for today’s topic, I’ve found it troubling how quickly we’ve all descended into the witch hunt of who or what is an AI these days. Artists accused of using AI because of simple mistakes, stylistic decisions, or just making stuff that looks too good. Schools having to figure if a student’s writing is AI because it’s just too bland, too awkward, or too verbose. Y’know, sometimes regular folk can just be bad writers without the aid of a large language model.
I’ve made a habit of accompanying my comics with these long-winded, stream-of-consciousness essays and I’m sure one of these days someone’s going to accuse me of using AI to generate these – I’m hoping my proclivity for using hyphens instead of em-dashes becomes a signature of my humanity. And I can at least find comfort that my art would probably never be accused of being AI generated. Because what even is this style? Who wants to steal this?
Anyway, back to the topic of AI detection software – I’m honestly not sure where this technology is these days. You look it up and there’s articles and studies from a year or two ago about how AI detectors are either a toss-up or completely useless, but still, this technology’s been developing fast and even a few months could be a drastic difference in the field. Any writing more recent is either an ad for some other company’s tool or a random blogger’s personal tests, so I’m not sure what the official story is on how accurate today’s detectors are.
Either way, it’s an arms race between the AI generators and the AI detectors, and I’m not willing to bet on the defense here. But there will be people in high places who need to make big decisions about these kinda things, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them are like grey-suit-purple-tie here, buying into the words of a smooth talking coin-tosser.
– James
