logoalt Hacker News

efavdblast Saturday at 3:25 PM2 repliesview on HN

Curious for the state on things here. Can we reliably tell if a text was LLM generated? I just heard of a prof screening assignments for this, but not sure how that would work.


Replies

arendtiolast Saturday at 7:03 PM

Well, I think it depends on how much effort the 'writer' is going to invest. If the writer simply tells the LLM to write something, you can be fairly certain it can be identified. However, I am not sure if the 'writer' provides extensive style instructions (e.g., earlier works by the same author).

Anecdotal: A few weeks ago, I came across a story on HN where many commenters immediately recognized that an LLM had written the article, and the author had actually released his prompts and iterations. So it was not a one-shot prompt but more like 10 iterations, and still, many people saw that an LLM wrote it.

jvanderbotlast Saturday at 3:29 PM

Of course there are people who will sell you a tool to do this. I sincerely doubt it's any good. But then again they can apparently fingerprint human authors fairly well using statistics from their writing, so what do I know.

show 1 reply