The well-known artificial intelligence firm OpenAI announced a tool in January that might save the academic community by identifying content produced with generative AI tools like their own ChatGPT. However, the technology shut down after six months since it did not work as expected.
Due to its substandard accuracy, OpenAI suddenly shut down their AI detection tool, AI Classifier, last week. Instead of making a new announcement, the company simply added a note to the first blog post that launched the product, outlining its reasoning. There is no longer a way to download a classifier from OpenAI.
According to its blog post, “ As of July 20, 20323, the AI classifier is no longer available due to its low rate of accuracy.”
The note simply provided a brief explanation for why the tool was shut down, and the link to it is no longer active. The company did clarify, though, that it was studying new, better ways of detecting AI-generated material.
OpenAI wrote, “We are working to incorporate feedback and are currently researching more effective provenance techniques for text, and have made a commitment to develop and deploy mechanisms that enable users to understand if audio or visual content is AI-generated.”
The development and use of AI detectors has developed into an expanding marketplace as new tools utilizing cutting-edge AI capabilities appear virtually every day.
When OpenAI first released its AI Classifier, it asserted that it could tell text produced by humans from text produced by AI. But they were transparent about its shortcomings, calling it “not fully reliable.” The evaluations on an English text “challenge set” showed that just 26% of AI-written material was correctly identified, whereas 9% of human-written content was wrongly identified as AI-written.
Education is one of the industries with a strong interest in precise AI detection. Teachers have expressed worries about pupils utilizing ChatGPT to write essays ever since it was released in November.
The company added that it will continue to expand its reach as it learns. “We recognize that identifying AI-written text has been an important point of discussion among educators, and equally important is recognizing the limits and impacts of AI generated text classifiers in the classroom,” said OpenAI.
