1. Death of AI detectors

When ChatGPT was first released in November 2022, it set alarm bells ringing. There were concerns about plagiarism. Students could use it to write essays without doing much work. That led to the release of GPTZero, the first AI text detector. A month later OpenAI released its own version (original announcement).

Unlike GPTZero’s founder, OpenAI was clear on the unreliability of the detector. They said - “It (the classifier) should not be used as a primary decision-making tool”. Everyone ignored these warnings.

The existence of such tools fueled false accusations in academia. There are a lot of stories about school teachers accusing students of using ChatGPT.

In recent months we saw studies debunking these AI detectors.

First, this paper debunked the practicality of these detectors. The authors noted two major points:

1. Using a light paraphrasing on the LLM text can break all detectors.

2. With an advanced LLM even the best detector will perform slightly better than random chance.

Another paper highlighted that the detectors incorrectly identify non-native English writing samples.

A deep-dive by The Verge dug into why these classifiers couldn’t identify AI texts correctly. In the article GPTZero’s founder said he was pivoting to another model:

OpenAI also shutdown its AI classifier. Though it happened quite unceremoniously. Only the original announcement has been updated.

OpenAI has now shut down its AI classifier. It happened quite unceremoniously. Only the original announcement has been updated.

The main takeaway: It is surprising how many people were bullish on these detectors. Even OpenAI with their knowledge said that the reliability was low.

Mark Twain said - It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.

So, despite the evidence it will be difficult to convince people that these detectors don’t work. We will still have teachers accusing students of using ChatGPT to do their homework.

2. Rise of Automated LLM Jailbreaks

There has been a fascination with making LLM chatbots misbehave. One of the first known instances was the Grandma exploit.

Today this doesn’t work. OpenAI has patched this behavior.

These jailbreaks require ingenuity and time. And OpenAI can patch this behavior quite quickly. Hence, with time new jailbreaks have trickled down. 

Now, researchers at CMU say that it is possible to automatically generate jailbreaks. These jailbreaks are sequences of characters which are human unreadable. The automatic nature of these jailbreaks means that an infinite number of jailbreaks can be created.

The study focuses on open-source LLMs like Llama 2 where the weights are available. But these outputs are easily transferable to closed source LLMs like ChatGPT.

Researchers seem to believe offense is the best form of defense. That is why they chose to release the findings.

The example in the paper is patched. So, you cannot reproduce it. But someone has been able to create a new attack on Llama 2:

The magic words are:

The main takeaway: Researchers state they are unclear if these attacks can be patched. An analogous attack in computer vision remains unsolved for over a decade.

So, if you are thinking of building a LLM app you must take this issue into account. 

3. Stable Diffusion XL 1.0

The full release of Stable Diffusion XL is finally here. It can be accessed on Clipdrop.

Stability claims “more vibrant” and “accurate” colors and better contrast, shadows and lighting. It can also draw things which are notoriously difficult for image models such as hands. It can also understand contexts better than before.

Weights and code for the model are hosted on Github.

🗞️10 AI news highlights and interesting reads

1. A McKinsey study says 30% of the work hours will be automated. Basically, AI will not replace us but require more out of us. For example, teams using Copilot will be expected to cut down on engineers and expected to deliver more with less. This will lead to aggressive cost cutting. 

2. After Meta’s coup with the open-source Llama -2 model, pressure is growing on OpenAI to follow through on its open-weights model promise. The model from OpenAI doesn’t have a release date.

3. Publishers are not going to go easy on generative AI companies. Publishers don’t want millions, they want billions.

   

4. Researchers said that dwindling numbers at Stack Overflow meant AI will limit open data. Stack Overflow says - hold my beer. They have launched OverflowAI.

5. Leave it to Microsoft to have the best announcements. Its AI shopping announcement contains hallucinations in the demo 🤦

6. Generative AI’s first impact has been felt on customer service and sales. A new study asked the customer operations and sales teams about their perception of AI. 79% think AI will have a positive impact on their work. And managers are more in favor compared to employees (big shocker!)

7. AI voices can help people who are going to lose their voice to diseases.

8. OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic form Frontier Model Forum to develop technical evaluations and benchmarks, and promote best practices and standards.

9. HuggingFace, Github, and others are asking for more leniency for open source models in the EU Act.

10. Geoffrey Hinton thinks AI has or will have emotions.

1. Building your own open source chatbot.

2. Another guide to fine tuning Llama 2.

3. Build custom personal software with an LLM