By: Nick Gambino
AI is here so we might as well get used to it. Fighting all forms of artificial intelligence is a fool’s errand that won’t put the genie back in the bottle. It’s here and it’s here to stay. So we might as well figure out how to protect ourselves and get along with these non-sentient 1s and 0s.
If we’re going to integrate AI into our lives and our technology we just need to regulate it and make sure it’s used for good and not the eradication of the human race. Ok, maybe that’s a little extreme, but we do need to make sure we’re using it as a tool and not to replace human artists and workers.
There’s a definite place for new technologies that enhance our workflow. I’m sure there were those who fought the steam engine, electricity, cars and computers. But we can all mostly agree these are now an invaluable part of our lives.
An essential factor in making sure AI is only being used as an enhancement tool is making sure we can detect when it’s in use. I know I’d rather know when I’m talking to or reading something generated by AI instead of a human. I’d especially like to know if the picture I’m looking at is real or fake.
There are lots of tools out there that allow you to detect AI content. There are different levels of quality and accuracy within these detectors, so you’re going to want to do your research. A good AI detection tool analyzes a ton of different information in a written text or image or video, identifying patterns that might be more closely associated with AI than a human.
AI detectors don’t work by checking things against a database or online text like Copyscape. That’s for direct plagiarism which you won’t usually find in a text “written” by AI. They’re looking for other things like burstiness, which is how long groups of texts are. This is a big one because AI tends to write in more uniform lengths while humans tend to be more random about sentence length.
A lot of these patterns and details may be invisible to the human eye or human brain, but they are there in hidden math. Although I would argue these hidden indicators are perceptible to humans even if they don’t know why. It’s like looking at a computer-generated image (CGI) in a movie. We can detect it because our eyes and brains are doing a ton of work we’re not even aware of.
If we’re going to use AI, we have to have a moral approach to it. Using AI detectors to know what’s real and what’s fake while also regulating what we want to allow AI to create, is a good start.
