May 2, 2024

Can digital watermarks prevent AI-generated plagiarism?

Those are difficult concerns with no definitive responses, however some scientists at OpenAI seem confident that they can identify AI-generated content Scott Aaronson, a computer technology teacher at the University of Texas at Austin and a guest researcher at OpenAI, just recently offered a lecture in which he revealed how his group is planning to flag AI-generated text material utilizing “statistical watermarking”.

ChatGPT is a giant neural network that uses a so-called transformer model that was trained on a large fraction of all the wealth of human understanding offered on the open web, presumably approximately 2021. The training essentially consists of playing a game over and over again: anticipate what word follows in this text string. Thats it. The funny thing about it is that after a couple of trillions of trillions of playing this game, the AI ends up being so great at plausibly anticipating the next word that ought to follow that it can deceive people its human.

As in many other instances, AI technology seems to be at least a few actions ahead of our efforts to rein it down. Aaronson stays optimistic, though. He thinks the watermarking technique theyre working on works well and doesnt impact the quality of the produced text.

Credit: IEEE Spectrum.

The proposed AI-generated material detection includes integrating some quantity of intentional randomness that makes the output both special and varied. If you have the crypto key, you can tell with a large degree of confidence of an essay, article, or solution to a concern on Quora was produced by an AI or a real individual.

Sure, if you copy/paste an essay created by ChatGPT word for word you may get easily caught. That might indeed work, although changing a few words will not be enough due to the fact that even gently modified AI-generated text might be spotted if the average function maximization is a match.

So it ends up you can utilize ChatGPT as a todo list. It will even enhance you for finishing your tasks Its extremely refreshing as a way to move through your day. pic.twitter.com/0vvQqhZTqS— Dan Shipper (@danshipper) December 13, 2022

“The hope is that this can be presented with future GPT releases. We d enjoy to do something similar for DALL-E– that is, watermarking images, not at the pixel level (where its too easy to eliminate the watermark) but at the “conceptual” level, the level of the so-called CLIP representation thats prior to the image. However we dont know if thats going to work yet,” the scientist stated.

By now, youve probably heard about ChatGPT, the AI chatbot developed by OpenAI that permits you to have human-like conversations with a genie that has the responses to virtually any concern. Possibly you are amongst the one million users who used the chatbot within its first week of release in early December. You are totally aware of how frighteningly good ChatGPT can be if thats the case.

This has gotten a great deal of people nervous. Academia might be flooded with AI-generated plagiarism and bad stars might utilize similar systems to produce lots of phony social media posts and remarks that are incredibly on point to control millions of individuals. Did a human or an AI write that? Is it even possible to tell?

” If you kipped down GPTs essays, I believe they d get at least a B in many courses. Not that I back any of you doing that! However yes, we are about to enter a world where students everywhere will at least be sorely lured to utilize text designs to write their term documents. Thats simply a tiny example of the social issues that these things are going to raise.”

All digital text is the very same, essentially just strings of characters on a computer screen, unlike an AI-generated image or more information-rich media like audio which can have strings of secret data that can hide an undetectable watermark. This makes it extremely challenging to identify AI-generated text– but not necessarily difficult. The technique that Aaronson and colleagues are planning to execute includes creating distinct random littles text that are random enough to be utilized as a signature while still preserving readability so regarding not tip individuals off.

” It appears to work quite well– empirically, a couple of hundred tokens appear to be enough to get an affordable signal that yes, this text originated from GPT. In concept, you could even take a long text and isolate which parts probably originated from GPT and which parts most likely didnt,” Aaronson said.

Aside from its often nonfactual output and the nonchalance with which it delivers essentially conversational bullshit, ChatGPT can be truly powerful. It can compose code and debug, take high school-level tests, do homework, explain and tutor, provide smart responses to hard questions from specific niche subjects, and more.

” GPT can fix high-school-level math issues that are given to it in English. It can reason you through the steps of the answer. Its beginning to be able to do nontrivial mathematics competition issues. Its on track to master essentially the entire high school curriculum, maybe followed quickly by the entire undergraduate curriculum,” Aaronson stated during a lecture hosted by the Effective Altruist club at UT Austin around a month earlier.

Will it work? To start with, the secret would be owned by OpenAI and hosted server-side. This indicates that other services that create AI text would not have the ability to gain access to it and would need to make their own watermark. Possibly in time and with cooperation, this will not actually be that much of a concern.

By utilizing a custom-made pseudorandom function, any string of text no matter length might be analyzed to discover if it optimizes this functions output. Simply put, this approach would look for bits in a text to see if it matches what an AI would generate.

The pull of war of AI-generated content.

The training basically consists of playing a game over and over again: predict what word comes next in this text string. That may certainly work, although replacing a couple of words wont be enough since even gently customized AI-generated text could be detected if the average function maximization is a match. He thinks the watermarking approach theyre working on works well and doesnt impact the quality of the created text.

All digital text is the exact same, basically just strings of characters on a computer system screen, unlike an AI-generated image or more information-rich media like audio which can have strings of secret information that can hide an undetectable watermark. The trick that Aaronson and colleagues are planning to execute involves generating unique random bits of text that are random adequate to be used as a signature while still preserving readability so as to not tip people off.

Each of these predicted words in a string of text is called a token. From a list of possible tokens as output, GPT chooses a winner with the greatest involved score, which is then utilized to produce the next token output.

If you utilized another AI to paraphrase GPTs output– well okay, were not going to be able to identify that. On the other hand, if you just insert or erase a few words here and there, or reorganize the order of some sentences, the watermarking signal will still be there.