Gen AI FAQ: Clarifications For Common Doubts
Ethan Mollick's answers to some of the most common questions he gets asked
Ethan Mollick, whose blog One Useful Thing is a must-read for anyone with a deeper interest in Gen AI, has written answers to the most common questions he gets asked about GenAI. It is well worth reading, as it clarifies some important misconceptions.
Example:
Can you detect AI writing?
No.
But what about AI writing detectors that claim to do that?
AI detectors don’t work. To the extent that they work at all, they can be defeated by making slight changes to text. And, what might be worse, they have high false positive rates and they tend to accuse people of using AI when they don’t use AI, especially students to whom English is a second language. The falsely accused have no recourse because they can’t prove they didn’t use AI.
You can’t detect AI writing automatically. Even OpenAI says you can’t.
But I am sure I am really good at detecting AI writing mysel-
Look, I am going to cut you off here. You might think you are good at detecting AI writing, but you are just okay at detecting bad AI writing, and you combine that with your own biases and heuristics about who might be using AI. After a couple of prompts, AI writing doesn’t sound like generic AI writing.
The other questions he has covered are:
Who knows how to best use AI to help me with my work?
So, what is the best way to get good at using AI?
I found something AI can’t do, does that mean that it is outside the Jagged Frontier?
Our company won’t let us use AI because we don’t want our data stolen, is that right?
What’s the deal with copyright and AI? (actually I wrote a fairly detailed answer on this point, but check out Ethan’s answer also.)
Aren’t AIs like GPT-4 getting worse with time?
Won’t AI development ground to a halt as the internet fills with AI data? Or as it runs out of data to train on?
How good does AI get?