OpenAI, the company behind the revolutionary AI chatbot ChatGPT, has created a free tool to detect AI-generated text.

”We’ve trained a classifier to distinguish between text written by a human and text written by AIs from a variety of providers,” the company said in a statement.

This will come as music to some lecturers’ ears – students who use ChatGPT for their assignments should start getting cautious…

However, OpenAI warns that the detector might not be completely reliable, and ”should not be used as a primary decision-making tool”.

”In our evaluations on a ‘challenge set’ of English texts, our classifier correctly identifies 26% of AI-written text (true positives) as ‘likely AI-written,’ while incorrectly labelling human-written text as AI-written 9% of the time (false positives). Our classifier’s reliability typically improves as the length of the input text increases. Compared to our previously released classifier, this new classifier is significantly more reliable on text from more recent AI systems,” the company further claims.

This detector is now available for the public.

The tool, known as a classifier, is fairly straightforward – you just paste text into the generator, and it will tell you whether it thinks the text is very unlikely, unlikely, unclear if it is, possibly, or likely AI-generated.