Ninety-Nine Percent
The idea: how rare a thing is changes what a warning about it means.
Read it
Who is in this book
- Malik There are two kinds of mistake, and you have to choose which one you are willing to risk from InferForge
- Danya a child of the Green Asks "how do we know?"
- Prei Of everything that got flagged, how much was really what you feared from FilterForge
- Corah Who got left out of the sample changes the answer from InferForge
- Tara a child of the Green Listens longest, speaks last
Every recurring character has a short tune, so you can tell who is on stage before a word is said. The tunes play only when you tap, and the Reading Access sound switch turns them off.
The Honest Page
Which parts of this story are true, stretched or made up?
True
- If one essay in a hundred is machine-written and a detector is right 99 times in 100 both ways, then out of 10,000 essays it flags 99 machine essays and 99 human ones: half of its flags are false.
- If one essay in ten is machine-written, the same detector flags 990 machine essays and 90 human ones, so most of its flags are right. The detector did not change; how common the thing is did.
- A 2023 study in the journal Patterns found that widely used AI-writing detectors often misclassified essays by non-native English writers as machine-written, while classifying native writers' essays accurately. Source
- This kind of mistake is called the base rate fallacy: judging a warning without asking how common the thing it warns about is. Source
Stretched
- The case's detector is right 99 times in 100 both ways. What we simplified: Real detectors report different rates for the two kinds of mistake, change with each update, and are often tested on essays that do not look like a real class's. The equal 99s keep the arithmetic simple.
Made up
- Leyla, Mr. Okafor, Hana, Josh and the school are made up, and so is the detector's name. The study is real.
Tara’s sentence
The case stops where Tara speaks. Write the sentence you would have said. It stays on this device.
Kept.
Your sentence lives on this device. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Ring the hammer for someone
Pick this book for someone younger. The link carries only the book, and it will wait for them on the Green.