> The thing is, humans are significantly worse at maximizing numerical goals than computers.
I'm not sure this is even the right premise.
Existing LLMs try to maximize engagement, and they often write in a particular style that has tells, but these two things are not necessarily related. Over-using em-dash or whatever isn't the thing that maximizes engagement.
So the two problems really are, what happens to the actual humans whose writing style is a close match for what a given generation of LLMs output? And, what stops LLMs from using a different style when someone wants to fool the classifier?
> People posting slop content don't care if pangram or I flag their slop with certainty, they are using the easiest option, which is commercial chat models.
They don't care as long as the consequences of identifying it are immaterial, but in that case what's the point of classifying it? Whereas if they need to fool the classifier some threshold percentage of the time in order for enough of their spam to get through, they're going to care.
> Over-using em-dash or whatever isn't the thing that maximizes engagement.
It's the thing that minimizes the loss during the RLHF phase, and the RLHF phase is the one that's aimed at maximizing engagement (it's literally trained on that).
> what happens to the actual humans whose writing style is a close match for what a given generation of LLMs output?
If a human, for instance because its writing gets polluted by reading too much AI slop, matches the style of an LLM closer than a certain threshold, then his own writing is going to be flagged as well. Whether it's an actual problem or merely a theoretical one is an open question. (unlike OpenAI and Anthropic, humans writers do have an incentive to avoid being flagged as AI).
> And, what stops LLMs from using a different style when someone wants to fool the classifier?
In theory: nothing. In practice if you fine-tune your own model: nothing. In practice with commercial models: the interests of the model making company.
> And, what stops LLMs from using a different style when someone wants to fool the classifier?
Websites have pretty much stopped using ad-blocker-blockers, it seems that it's not a fight worth fighting for them. Does that mean that ad-blockers are useless?
Most people don't even care about ads, I don't think they care about slop either, that's why there's slop posts and obnoxious websites that are unreadable without an ad blocker. A slop blocker used by 10-20% of the internet users wouldn't change the calculation more than ad blockers did.