[sigmoid10]

That's like saying whether or not you're going to fall in love this year is just one bit of information, so you might be able to read it from astrology. Yeah, sure, it might happen for some people with a certain star sign. But across the population there is zero reason to believe that there is a) any significant correlation and b) enough data variation in to even distinguish classes of humans.

[yorwba]

Indeed you cannot rule out astrology on information-density grounds. Astrology involves quite a lot of information, the problem is that it's mostly unrelated to the outcomes of interest. To get back to the information-density of text, "I love you" doesn't contain a lot of information, but it does contain the one bit you care about, because someone who loves you is more likely to say it than someone who doesn't.

So if you want to determine whether something was written by a human or by AI, to do better than chance it's enough for there to be a difference in the probabilites of a human writing it and AI writing it, respectively. Whether the resulting accuracy is good enough for a particular use case is another matter. 99% is pretty good odds for love and pretty bad odds for "am I going to survive today?" Hopefully there won't be a death penalty for posting AI-generated content.

[lemagedurage]

The 80% accuracy from the article would be one reason to believe there's significant correlation, no?

[sigmoid10]

I could probably find quite a lot of people who will tell you astrology is 80+% correct for them. Would you believe them or wait for an independent analysis? There are other AI "detector" systems out there that claim 99% accuracy. But independent research always found that they are actually garbage once used on real data. It's all in how you pick your tests. It's also funny to see how people on places like HN will easily dismiss stuff astrology, but fall for the exact same patterns when used in tech-y applications.

[lemagedurage]

Well I don't think the position of planets when you're born has a large correlation to how your life will go.

On the other hand, how an AI writes will have a big correlation to whether the written text would likely be written by an AI.

The latter is more of a direct relationship.

Maybe A and B are not correlated, and Y and Z are? What pattern are people falling for here?

[strgcmc]

It's not really about the planets. It's about what other people believe about the planets.

You could work for a boss that's a Leo, and he/she believes only Leos deserve to get promoted, or that Leos and Scorpios should never be assigned together on a shared project. Your life and career trajectory under this boss could be totally different, depending on whether you were born a Leo or not.

Certainly "not all bosses" applies, but it's not really that farfetched or uncommon either. The point is that a correlation does exist, but it's a social one and not a physical or astronomical one (and it's also often a self-reinforcing/self-fulfilling one: Leos who read what astrology says Leos should do, may end up choosing to behave more like that).

So in the LLM example, it may not really matter much what physical markers of provenance or physical correlations there are, as social beliefs or perceptions about suspected provenance may be the strongest correlation anyways (in terms of impact and outcomes).