ChatGPT maker OpenAI has new search and voice features on the way, but it also has a tool at its disposal that’s reportedly pretty good at catching all those AI-generated fake articles you see on the internet nowadays. The company has been sitting on it for nearly two years, and all it would have to do is turn it on. All the same, the Sam Altman-led company is still contemplating whether to release it as doing so might anger OpenAI’s biggest fans.
This isn’t that defunct AI detection algorithm the company released in 2023, but something much more accurate. OpenAI is hesitant to release this AI-detection tool, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal on Sunday based on some anonymous sources from inside the company. The program is effectively an AI watermarking system that imprints AI-generated text with certain patterns its tool can detect. Like other AI detectors, OpenAI’s system would score a document with a percentage of how likely it was created with ChatGPT.
The supposed program is reportedly 99.9% effective based on internal documents, according to the WSJ. This would be far better than the stated effectiveness of other AI detection software developed over the past two years. That’s likely because OpenAI has access to its own secret sauce. Internal proponents of the program say it will do a lot to help teachers figure out when their students have handed in AI-generated homework.
The company reportedly sat on this program for years over concerns that close to a third of its user base wouldn’t like it. Gizmodo reached out to OpenAI for comment, but we did not immediately hear back. The company told WSJ that the tech has “important risks we’re weighing while we research alternatives.”
The other problem for OpenAI is the concern that if it releases its tool broadly enough, somebody could decipher OpenAI’s watermarking technique. There is also an issue that it might be biased against non-native English speakers.
Google also developed similar watermarking techniques for AI-generated images and text called SynthID. That program isn’t available to most consumers, but at the very least the company is open about its existence.
As fast as big tech is developing new ways to spit out AI-generated text and images onto the internet, the tools to detect fakes aren’t nearly as capable. Teachers and professors and especially hard-pressed to discover if their students are handing in ChatGPT-written assignments. Current AI detection tools like Turnitin have a failure rate as high as 15%. The company said it does this to avoid false positives.
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