Proof of work, human version.

Yes, anybody can write an agent to meander about typing the chatgpt generated text into Google docs. Yes, Google could judge how likely it's that a document was typed by a human, but they won't for the same reasons openAI just cancelled this.

Somebody (maybe reacting to this news, maybe reading this thread) will write such an editor or evaluator. Another solution is screen recording as you write. Another (the best one, and the hardest one for educators) is to not request or grade things a robot can write better than most humans.

This will be hard to break. It’s basically an hour long CAPTCHA. You can look at things like key stroke timing, mouse movement, revision pattern, etc. I don’t see LLM’s breaking this approach to classify human writing.

> I don’t see LLM’s breaking this approach to classify human writing.

Why not? Record a bunch of humans writing, train model, release. That's orders of magnitude simpler than to come up with the right text to begin with.

Lol. I love HN -- the reaction is because this is either straight-faced or tongue-in-cheek, if it's straight-faced, this is stylistically a parody of the infamous "well Dropbox is rsync, it's moat is basically a SWE-weekend" comment

Someone can release this as a product though, exactly like Dropbox. Dropbox basically was rsync, it just had a better UX. There are a lot of people these days that are pretty good at taking ML models and slapping a nice UX on top of them.

Seems easy to me? Just manually copy the text by typing it in yourself. There may be certain patterns that could potentially give it away vs truly human-generated text, but will Google Docs revision history show that level of detail?

Retyping the essay from the chatgpt while actively rewording the occassional sentence seems like it would do it.

It seems like that's nearing the sweet spot of fraud prevention, where committing the act of fraud is as much work as doing the real thing.

The intellectual labor of thinking about an essay, drafting it, editing, and revising it is much higher than strategically re-typing a ChatGPT output. One requires experience, knowledge, understanding and creativity, the other one requires basic functioning of motor skills and senses.

You could program a robot to re-type the ChatGPT output into a different word processor and feed it parameters to make the duration between keystrokes and backspaces fluctuate over time. You could even have it stop, come back later, copy and paste sections and re-organize as it moves through and end up with the final essay from ChatGPT.

Doesn't sound like it to me. Researching a topic can be a lot of effort, while typing is easy, even with occasional rephrasing. Hell, even with constant rephrasing it's not very hard.

Having a student sit there and type out, word for word, a decent essay on the subject is probably fairly effective education for a LOT of subjects.

In the same vein that letting students write calculator programs to do the quadratic formula for them during a test is actually a pretty good way to get them to learn the quadratic formula.

It's not an exact equivalent to the intent of an essay today - from an education perspective - but it's not a complete miss either.

It's better than nothing, sure, but nowhere close to as good as doing the research and formulating the ideas yourself.

Not when someone creates a browser extension that you run while using Google Docs, feed the entire ChatGPT doc into it and it recreates the doc over a 2 hour period with small bits and pieces.

It sounds a lot easier to retype what you see rather than to create it.

It's a bit suspicious to type an essay linearly from start to finish, though.

A bit like how us old timers had to write our exams in the pen and paper days.

Is it? That's how I've always written them (and still do to this day). I write the first draft linearly from start to end, then go back and do my revising and editing.

Well, that's what I mean. The revisions and edits are what show that you wrote it, rather than copying from an AI line by line.

Will Google Docs provide that level of detail for revision history in a way that teachers can easily see that's it's likely AI-generated, and have high confidence in that?

Google Docs already does have this level of revision history.

Well, there is one way, which is timed, proctored exams.

Which sucks, because take-home projects are evaluating a different skill set, and some people thrive on one vs the other. But it is what it is.

>Of course the smart student will easily figure out a way to stream the GPT output into Google Docs, perhaps jumping around to make "edits".

No need to complicate it that much. Just start off writing an essay normally, and then paste in the GPT output normally. A teacher probably isn't going to check any of the revision history, especially if there's more than 30 students to go through.

Easy thing to do would be very low maximum word counts. ChatGPT is incapable of brevity.