| > This does not sit well with personal experience and I wonder if it is just one of these questions of AI people being unaware of the level of skill that exists in domains they think have been automated. I suspect the difficulty here lies more with your reading of the quoted sentence. British grammar school education, for all the years it devotes to the enterprise, does not always succeed in teaching reading comprehension. You seem to be treating two rather different propositions as though they were one and the same. If text in general is not sufficiently information dense to support decoding some _arbitrary_ signal of provenance, that hardly establishes that no _specific_ passage can carry distinctive markers of provenance. For example, you can recognize the unmistakable cadence of the California undergraduate. Impressive. Alas, even in your own example, when your British friends are "giving themselves away", you resort to an external signal, beyond the text, to determine provenance! That is, unless the text itself is claiming that its author is British (like the bots who claim they're John Horsetrader from Arkansas oblast). When you have to decide whether a 2010s era SAT essay was from a SAT prep book author or an LLM prompted to write such an essay, you will struggle to distinguish one from the other. Not all texts have provenance signals. This is what it means for text to simply not be information dense enough to be able to decode some arbitrary signal of provenance from it. |
Well aren't you a genuine delight?
> Alas, even in your own example, when your British friends are "giving themselves away", you resort to an external signal, beyond the text, to determine provenance!
A possibility I addressed in the actual text you are responding to, where I started the sentence with "It is of course possible" and continued to clarify that "...so many of the situations…" I encounter it are localised.
It's almost like I was expressing just such an awareness of the limits of my assertion, isn't it?