This isn't even at the level of the spam filter on your email account. Are there some false positives and negatives? Yes. Are there some people sending emails who are negatively affected by falsely ending up in the junk mail folder? Yes. Are we going to turn off spam filtering because of this? No. Why should we accept video spam any more than text spam?
The problem is that it's not SOME false positives, AI detectors so far have been all so comically bad that they might be classified as pseudoscience. Or an artificial false positive generators even.
We'll I'd think that YouTube would have incentive to get it right. Either there are too many false positives and the content creators go away and YouTube collapses. Or there are too many false negatives and the viewers go away, and YouTube collapses. I mean there is a chance that garbage people will ruin video sharing platforms for everyone.
Having the incentive to do something and having the ability to do it are not the same thing.
It's not like human-generated content is made of carbon and AI-generated content is made of silicon and the science of chemistry can unambiguously tell them apart. If you asked a million humans and a million LLMs to write a sentence on a specific subject, it's not implausible that one of the LLMs and one of the humans would output the exact same sentence. Maybe more than one.
A thing that can take only the output and accurately tell you if it was AI-generated or not is therefore impossible, because if it said no it would be wrong when the LLM generates that sentence, but if it said yes it would be wrong when a human generates the exact same sentence.
All it can do is try to calculate a probability. But then what do you want to do with that? Suppose the probability it estimates for some content is 45%, and that probability estimate is an accurate measure of the true probability, i.e. can't be improved when the only information you have is the content itself. Do you want to ban the 55% of that content which is human-generated, or allow the 45% which is AI-generated?
Right now the problem is the flood of low-quality AI spam that might (or might not) be low hanging fruit. We can worry about high quality AI artifacts later if that becomes a problem. (and yes, there is no guarantee that YouTube won't fail due to these spammers)
I get the idea: get 10k each samples of human data and AI data, train a simple classifier until it gets 99.9999% accuracy or <10k false negatives per day at your scale, ship it as a screening tool.
Is such tool feasible at all with current state of AI technology, or is it just a reasonable take from the past that may not be so reasonable anymore?
> I get the idea: get 10k each samples of human data and AI data, train a simple classifier until it gets 99.9999% accuracy or <10k false negatives per day at your scale
The issue is, that's not a thing. AI-generated content and human-generated content have significant overlap. No amount of training data can allow you to distinguish them with that level of accuracy because many outputs exist that could have been generated by either one. Additional training data allows you to say that the probability is 55.0374% plus or minus 0.0001, rather than only being able to say that it's 55% plus or minus 5%. It can tell you with greater precision exactly how ambiguous it is. What it can't do is remove the ambiguity.
We will find out shortly? YouTube is the one saying they are going to implement this:
"If a creator doesn’t specify whether or not they used AI, but our systems detect significant photorealistic AI use, we will now automatically apply a label."
Even worse if it's some attribute considered by the algorithm but not disclosed. "Likely AI" is enough to be damaging without even being tagged "Disclosed as AI"
This isn't a choice between "perfectly fine how things are now" and "destroying credibility". If it were, you're right - "good enough to be useful" wouldn't be a high enough bar.
Things are not perfectly fine how things are now. AI slop is destroying the internet. Tons of grifters are earning tons of money off YouTube by brainwashing millions of people with AI slop, including my mom. YouTube needs to do something and this seems feasible and far better than doing nothing.
I also think the false positive rate is going to be far lower than you think - especially if YouTube sets a caution threshold.
I'm open to other solutions but if you propose we just keep what we have now, then you are proposing an absolute disaster.
"Works most of the time" isn't good enough here.