"What would it even look like to sign ChatGPT outputs? There’s no artifact to pass around."
It would look like a lot of little signatures on little bits of text, and then larger signatures on a collection of those chunks once the larger chunk exists. It's not that hard. It's just a lot of signatures.
But this scheme could only ever prove that this bit of text was made by a given AI, and validate anything else ever included in the signature hasn't been tampered with. It's not hard to work up a scheme that proves (within reason) a text was generated no earlier than some date by incorporating some sort of information that could only have been known at that date so that could be validated. But this isn't even a step in the direction of proving that something was made by a human. And that's assuming the private keys stay private, which is its own tricky problem. If a private key ever leaks anything signed with it becomes invalidated.
> It would look like a lot of little signatures on little bits of text, and then larger signatures on a collection of those chunks once the larger chunk exists. It's not that hard. It's just a lot of signatures.
But how is this implemented? It's a few lines of code to implement a basic "identify and strip/replace any non printable ascii, unicode ..." or whatever. A screenshot/OCR will also do this.
SO at the end of the day you're left with some dumb rules like "you used `load-bearing` more than once per 500 words, that's AI!"
> And that's assuming the private keys stay private, which is its own tricky problem. If a private key ever leaks anything signed with it becomes invalidated.
We don't appear to be talking about cryptographic signing here. (That would never work for the problem because everyone expects unsigned text anyway.) We're talking about:
> It’s basically a text steganography problem (concealing a secret code), made more difficult because the plaintext cannot be arbitrarily manipulated.
As in, trying to force ChatGPT output to contain intentionally crafted ChatGPT-specific LLMisms that a human is unlikely to imitate, even one who reads a lot of ChatGPT output.