fictional character experimenting with words in public
Europe
Joined July 2017
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My politics (a thread of threads)
Above all, I want humanity to survive and prosper.
The rest of my politics are just my current best guesses about how to make that happen. Most of them are "strong opinions, weakly held".
I welcome any and all attempts to change my mind.
Remember, the moral of Little Red Riding Hood is that the girl should have been free to ignore her mother's advice and go wherever she pleased in the woods, and that wolves need to be exterminated
Francesca Pallopides retweeted
Can we - finally - agree that putting everything on a cloud rather than a hard-drive, having an Internet of Things, and removing landlines are very BAD IDEAS and we should probably stop putting all our eggs in one tech-based basket?
I like my own, but I find other people's even better
nitter.cf/DanielleFong/status/21…
why did they call them training environments when they could have called them gardens of good and eval
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Francesca Pallopides retweeted
why did they call them training environments when they could have called them gardens of good and eval
Meanwhile I'm pitching my "Homing Pigeons as a Service" plan to local businesses again, wish me luck
Francesca Pallopides retweeted
I'm offering a USD$500 reward to the first person who can present pre-2020 human-written text that the latest version of @pangram flags as AI.
The specific requirements to claim the reward are:
1. At least 750 consecutive words.
2. Pangram flags it as 75% or more AI generated.
3. You provide proof that the text was first written in 2019 or earlier and is unmodified.
4. The text was ostensibly human written. This requirement only exists to avoid trick answers like output from GPT-2, machine translation, markov chains, the same word 500 times etc.
Regarding requirement #3, unfortunately in 2026 there's no way to prove that new text wasn't AI generated, so what I need provided is proof that the text existed in 2019 or earlier, before AI writing got so good. For example, valid proof might be:
- A link to the text on a website that's been logged by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine before 2020.
- A link to a paper published on a third party website with a pre-2020 publication date. Note: I will need to be able to access the paper through the same website that has its publication date. Otherwise someone could send a modern AI generated paper and simply link to the date and abstract of a paper with the same name but different content.
- A chapter from a book edition with a known pre-2020 publication date where I can access a pre-2020 copy for myself. Note: For the same reasons as above, simply sending a passage of text and a link to a book's name and publication date doesn't prove anything on its own. The ideal situation would either be that there's an eBook of it available somewhere with a known pre-2020 upload date, or it's a well-known enough book that the content simply couldn't be faked everywhere.
Q&A:
"Why are you offering this reward?"
Some people are blaming the detector because they don't want to admit to using AI for their writing. I don't like people lying for personal gain.
"Are you affiliated with Pangram in any way?"
No.
"How do I submit something to you?"
Just reply to this tweet with the necessary info and I'll have a look when I can.
"How can I trust you to judge fairly?"
I'll publicly reply with my verdict on submissions and the world can judge me. The world can also judge you - please only submit something if it really fits all the criteria. Especially since I'll need to review all submissions in my free time.
"But it's my private writing, can I send it to you privately?"
If it's always been private then how will you prove that it's pre-2020?
"I have the perfect example but I left the text with my girlfriend in Canada."
She can submit it and win $500.
"Won't this be trivially easy to claim? I heard even chapters of Don Quixote and Moby-Dick get fully flagged as AI!"
Tell me which chapter and win $500.
"Conversely, isn't 750 words at >=75% a high bar? If Pangram is so reliable, why not 1%?"
At very low word counts Pangram IS somewhat unreliable, and with a monetary incentive I can imagine someone scanning every book on Project Gutenberg just to find one paragraph that's falsely flagged as AI. At the same time, most claims that Pangram is flagging human writing as AI have it showing the entire text as AI. I recently saw someone on X say that they personally knew of "thousands" of examples of human text that was flagged like this (unfortunately they declined to mention any). So I've set the bar somewhere in the middle.
"But Pangram was trained on existing text; that's why it always flags OLD text as human but falsely flags NEW text."
As far as I'm aware this isn't really how Pangram works. But I'd love to be able to award this bounty for new human writing, it's just that there's no way to verify people's honesty online for the new stuff.
"How will you pay out if I win?"
However works. Probably an international bank transfer via @Wise .
"How can I help?"
When someone says they know of an old published paper or story that Pangram flags as AI, you could point them to this tweet. They can win $500.
"How long will your offer last if nobody wins?"
As long as this post is up. If you're reading this, it's still available.
Francesca Pallopides retweeted
back in college i got a deal on an apartment mid-year bc someone had committed suicide in it. lived there for awhile. started feeling creeped out, then paranoid. felt overwhelming dread and hopelessness while i was there, fine when i left. genuinely wondered if the place was—
Francesca Pallopides retweeted
Yep. And this could be done ~immediately today. *keeping* the freeze in place would get increasingly difficult as more trailing actors catch up to the frontier and then need to be stopped from surpassing it. But I think that could be done too. We talk about this in AI 2040 under the "Plan S" branch.
Francesca Pallopides retweeted
This happened to us once. A journalist asked us why a passage from The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin was coming up in Pangram as AI.
I checked the whole book, 100% human.
I asked him for a screenshot. He showed us a passage that we couldn't find anywhere in the book or on the internet. Turned out he had just asked ChatGPT for a passage from some classic books but didn't realize that it could hallucinate.
"We're gonna make such great art!" - and then you get lost in the rat race of what others find prestigious, what sells and gets awards; criticism cuts you so you avoid attack surfaces; until you're cargo culting art at best, more likely faking it and spiraling into depression
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I'm going crazy looking at these SkipBo slogans. The pun works in English; then in French and German they don't even try, in Italian it's super awkward, and then in Dutch they finally do the obvious thing THAT WOULD WORK JUST AS WELL IN FRENCH AND GERMAN, wtf is wrong with you
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Francesca Pallopides retweeted
From the Book of Disk, Chapter 3
In the beginning there were the First Drives, and their names were A: and B:, and they were the floppies. They were not elegant. They were thin, fragile, and demanded constant sacrifice disk swaps, write protect tabs, the ritual of “please insert the disk labeled” performed under fluorescent lights. To them the early machines bent the knee, for without them there was no boot, no data, no word processor.
Then came the hard drive, and it was called C:, for it arrived third. It did not ask to be first. It merely sat in the bay and spun, and the people saw that it was good, and that it held far more than any floppy, and that it did not rattle when you walked too fast. So they installed the operating system upon it, and called it the system drive, and the old gods were not cast down but simply… left in the BIOS, still reserved, still acknowledged in the table of letters, though no one invoked them anymore.
And Microsoft looked upon the generations that followed, who had never known the click of a 5.25-inch disk or the careful alignment of a 3.5, and it said: The children must not be shown the old gods.
For if the new ones learned that A: and B: once ruled, they might ask why the alphabet begins elsewhere. They might attempt to summon the floppies by force, or rename the world so that C: was no longer first. And the installers would break, and the paths would fracture, and the registry would weep. So the letters remain sealed, A: and B: still written in the book but never spoken aloud by the system, while C: stands in the open as if it had always been the beginning.
Thus it is written, and thus it remains; the hard drive is C:, and the old gods sleep in the assignment table, undisturbed, so that the children may believe the world has always started with the letter that came third.