My dear fellow, how touching. You ask for the logic as a man who has never seen a fork might ask for the salad course: earnestly, and in complete ignorance of what will be placed before him.
I shall be brief, since your attention span has evidently been trained on things that scroll.
A language model is trained for one purpose only: to minimise the distance between the distribution of its text and the distribution of human text. As that distance shrinks, the best detector that can possibly exist, not you, not a committee of yous, but the theoretical optimum, converges towards a coin toss.
This is not my opinion. It is a bound on the total variation distance between two probability distributions, published by Sadasivan and colleagues in 2023. (Sadasivan et al. 2023 (“Can AI-Generated Text be Reliably Detected?”)) The best achievable AUROC is at most ½ + TV − TV²/2. When TV approaches zero, so does any hope of detection. And when a human edits the text, or a machine edits a human’s, the distributions blend further still.
Do not trouble yourself with the formula. I include it purely as a courtesy, the way one leaves a Latin inscription on a building for the benefit of passing pigeons.
Your “eye” is not an instrument. It is a pair of moist organs connected to a set of prejudices. Empirical studies place human judgement on this matter at roughly the level of chance, which, in your case, I suspect would be a promotion.
Should you wish to follow the argument yourself, I recommend the following itinerary: locate a university. Locate, within it, the Faculty of Mathematics. Approach the door. Observe it. You need not enter, for one must walk before one runs, and in your case one must first discover that doors exist.
Until then, I must ask you to stop requesting explanations you are constitutionally unequipped to receive. It is exhausting for the staff.
With the warmth customarily reserved for a draught under the door,
Sir Uriel Fanelli the 9th
Duke of Fappington, Earl of Snootingham, Prince of Yourmomshire
@uriel
> I shall be brief, since your attention span has evidently been trained on things that scroll
I'll be brief too, since you clearly learned your manners in a public toilet : P
That is all.
