OpenAI appears to have quietly discontinued its AI detection tool, which allowed users to check if a piece of text was written by a human or by artificial intelligence (AI) services. It used to work for content generated by OpenAI's ChatGPT as well as other generative AI text services. The company on July 20 added an update to the product announcement page, noting that "the AI classifier is no longer available due to its low rate of accuracy" (emphasis ours). This shouldn't come as a surprise as OpenAI has been skeptical about its AI detection tool from the get-go, noting that the "classifier is not fully reliable" and it "is impossible to reliably detect all AI-written text," when the tool was launched in January this year. OpenAI, however, added that is "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." Why does this matter: The discontinuation of the AI detection tool reiterates the fact that distinguishing AI-generated content from human-generated content is hard and is only going to get harder as AI technology advances. This is going to be one of the most significant challenges when dealing with how to regulate AI because without being able to determine the provenance of a piece of content, dealing with fake or false information, deep fakes, and other kinds of fraud or deception will be harder. Article continues below ⬇, you might also…
