In today’s episode, we’ll expose the telltale signs of AI-generated content. You’ll learn how to spot bland, repetitive text with ease. You’ll benefit from understanding the key statistical concepts that give away AI-written pieces. Finally, you’ll gain the knowledge to use AI responsibly and avoid the pitfalls of low-quality output.
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for watching the video.
Christopher Penn: In today’s episode, let’s talk about two hallmarks of AI generated content, particularly written content.
There’s two measures perplexity, and burstiness.
These are both statistical concepts.
perplexity is the diversity of language used and burstiness relates to changes in length of how much language there is AI generated content today out of the box without a lot of prompt engineering, tends to be low perplexity, and low burstiness, right? We all have seen and can pretty easily spot like, hey, that was written by chat GPT, it just has that flavor to it.
It’s kind of like, like, like McDonald’s fries that have not gone cold, but they’re not hot, either.
They’re kind of in the middle, like, they’re okay, but I wish I had something better.
Right? That’s what AI content is, because it’s low perplexity.
Christopher Penn: And low burstiness.
Now, what does this mean? How do we explain this? Well, let’s explain in terms of sushi, there’s a lot of food in today’s episode.
Suppose you’re making like cucumber rolls, or the sushi of your choice.
If you’re an amateur like me, what’s your sushi gonna look like? It’s gonna be kind of a mess, right? Again, you have wildly different size rolls, some rolls are thin, some rolls are thick, the ingredients, the cucumbers are unevenly cut, they’re not nicely in slices.
I remember during the pandemic, during the early, early months when you know, nothing was open, you had to make stuff at home and made some homemade sushi and it was really uneven.
It was pretty amateur.
And that was a hallmark of something made by a human for sure and an amateur.
Now suppose you are a sushi chef, you’re a sushi pro, you’ve been making it for 20 years, or you’re a sushi machine, like a literal machine, you own a sushi machine, they do exist.
What’s your sushi gonna look like? Every role is gonna be nearly identical, the perfect amount of tuna or cucumber or whatever, it’s good, the rice is going to be perfectly cooked, it’s going to be rolled exactly the same.
It’s gonna be cut exactly the same.
When you put it on a plate, it’s gonna look nice and orderly and neat.
The variance in ingredients and amount and size, all of it will be nearly zero.
Every aspect of it will be just perfect, uniform and identical.
In sushi that that’s a good thing.
You want uniformity, you want the same quality fish all the time.
You want the Christopher Penn: same quality of rice all the time.
And it’s easy to spot right, you put a plate of Chris’s homemade sushi next to a machine made or professionally made and it’s pretty easy to spot which one is was made by by Chris at home, right? With AI generated content, you can still see that uniformity, but it’s less of a good thing.
And it’s also just as easy to spot.
Go on to LinkedIn, see the same, you know, then you put up a post, you see the same LinkedIn comment over and over again from from somebody from a group of people like, hey, very insightful post about this thing, rocket ship emoji, right? Great explanation, thumbs up, Christopher, that auto generated spam, it’s got very low perplexity, the same general vocabulary is being used by these by these AI based bot services.
And so you can spot and it’s got low burstiness, the comments are all the same exact length, like two sentences long.
It’s like, hey, really great insights, looking forward to more blah, blah, blah, right? It’s the same all the time.
And so you can spot that, particularly when you start getting a few of these adding up on the on the same post, you’re like, okay, that’s, that’s about perplexity and burstiness.
They have low perplexity, same language, they have low burstiness, same exact content length.
Now, can AI generate content that mirrors human content? Yes, yes, it can.
It can do anything it’s trained to do.
The reason why it’s so easy to spot today is because the people who are using it like this, basically spam bots to build their thought leadership on LinkedIn, they either have no training, or no motivation to invest more than the bare minimum effort in learning how to use AI.
They’re using a, they’re using a vendor who made the software as cheaply as possible.
With the same lack of effort and knowledge, they’re probably using the lowest cost possible model.
So you’re going to get fairly bland common results as opposed to using a custom tuned model.
Like if I was going to go and build a comment bot for LinkedIn, I would not use the cheapest model possible, I would not have a short Python script that a developer maybe even chat GPT wrote, I would invest a lot of time to make something that sounded like me that had a unique perspective that had you know, the prompt would be like, yes, long, because if I’m going to build something like that, I want it to be built.
Well, vendors who are building these tools as shortcuts, essentially, social media shortcuts, don’t really have that motivation.
If you’re going to use a tool, an AI based to a language model based tool for things like boosting social media engagement, like as a comment, but please get great tools and invest a lot of time tuning them to be as close to you as possible.
If a tool promises that it’s, it’s turnkey requires no effort on your part, just push the button and go and you’ll be a thought leader.
It’s a bad tool.
And I mean, this is probably a little bit rude, but if you’re out to generate synthetic engagement with no effort on your part, you’re a bad marketer.
So it’s the use of AI tools is neither good nor bad, because it’s just a tool.
How you use it, what you’re using it for and how skillfully you use it, that determines whether the outputs are good or bad.
But from what I’ve seen people doing, so far, it’s pretty bad.
So please do take the time to learn how AI works to learn how models work to learn how to tune these tools and invest the time and the data to do it and you you will get better results and everyone else will be happier with it.
Thanks for tuning in.
We’ll talk to you in the next one.
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