Can AI-Generated Text be Reliably Detected? · HackerPapers discussions

Can AI-Generated Text be Reliably Detected? — mentioned by 0x_rs

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:19:49 GMT

I'd encourage reading this paper, and literature on scaling laws in autoregressive models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11156 Total variation distance has been measured to decrease as you scale a model, and that is the primary mechanism "watermarking" as discussed in the Anthropic announcement relies on. It becomes more difficult to reliably detect text as a fixed sample count without tweaking the distribution further. Either way, it's a minor problem that will be addressed over time, compared to the issue of who can detect this without guessing or developing their own sets: providers not…

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Can AI-Generated Text be Reliably Detected? — mentioned by 0x_rs

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:04:06 GMT

If we go by "fool's errand" as "needless or profitless endeavor", https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11156 may already be a good enough answer to the paper you cited, so their work is already laid out for them. The green token idea is thoroughly attacked with much more effective techniques than those in the original paper through "recursive paraphrasing". Among some hypotheses in the paper, one is particularly interesting: >These experiments provide empirical evidence that more advanced LLMs can lead to smaller TV distances. Thus, based on Theorem 1, reliable AI text detection would become…

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Can AI-Generated Text be Reliably Detected? — mentioned by mendeza

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 20:11:28 GMT

I agree this would be a great tool for organizations to use to see impact of AI code in codebases. Engineers will probably be too lazy to modify the code enough to make it look less AI. You could probably enhance the robustness of your classifier with synthetic data like this. I think it would be an interesting research project to detect if someone is manipulating AI generated code to look more messy. This paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.11156 Sadasivan et. al. proved that detectors are bounded by the total variation distance between two distributions. If two distributions are truly the…

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Can AI-Generated Text be Reliably Detected? — mentioned by simonw

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 04:05:50 GMT

A great deal of harm is being caused by "AI detectors" today. There is an endless stream of stories about students who have their work flagged as "AI generated" by a detector when it wasn't - and then get failing grades, from teachers who don't understand that AI detectors are inherently inaccurate. Here's a paper about how unreliable they are from last year: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11156 OpenAI shutting down theirs was the right call.

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Can AI-Generated Text be Reliably Detected? — mentioned by thewataccount

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 15:06:58 GMT

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.10226.pdf Here's a decent paper on it. It covers private watermarking (you can't detect it exists without a key), resistance to modifications, etc. Essentially you wouldn't know it was there and you can't make simple modifications to fool it. OpenAI could already be doing this, and they could be watermarking with your account ID if they wanted to. The current best countermeasure is likely paraphrasing attacks https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.11156.pdf

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Can AI-Generated Text be Reliably Detected? — mentioned by thewataccount

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 18:30:27 GMT

Most likely not https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11156 tl;dr - it's highly unreliable to detect them and because of the risk of false-positives it's not likely a good idea to rely on it. IMO the only way forward is a reputation based system. Also moving forward identity verification might have to be cryptographic (IM NOT SAYING CRYPTOCURRENCY) because impersonating text/video/voice convincingly is becoming doable for home users.

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Can AI-Generated Text be Reliably Detected? — mentioned by Veen

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 12:01:54 GMT

It matters because LLMs can tell plausible lies at incredible scale: marketing, propaganda, misinformation and disinformation, etc. Understanding whether content is AI generated would be a useful red flag, but we can't. Nor can supposed "AI detectors" do so with any reliability [0]. It's going to be a problem. [0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11156

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Can AI-Generated Text be Reliably Detected? — HN submission

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 21:51:31 GMT

Can AI-Generated Text Be Reliably Detected?

81 points; 94 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.