From OpenAI’s announcement:
We’ve trained a classifier to distinguish between text written by a human and text written by AIs from a variety of providers. While it is impossible to reliably detect all AI-written text, we believe good classifiers can inform mitigations for false claims that AI-generated text was written by a human
The classifier is accessible for free on OpenAI’s website. My apologies to Turnitin and GPTZero.
Near the end of the announcement, OpenAI links to their new Educator considerations for ChatGPT page.
We recognize that many school districts and higher education institutions do not currently account for generative AI in their policies on academic dishonesty. We also understand that many students have used these tools for assignments without disclosing their use of AI. Each institution will address these gaps in a way and on a timeline that makes sense for their educators and students. We do however caution taking punitive measures against students for using these technologies if proper expectations are not set ahead of time for what users are or are not allowed.
Classifiers such as the OpenAI AI text classifier can be helpful in detecting AI-generated content, but they are far from foolproof. These tools will produce both false negatives, where they don’t identify AI-generated content as such, and false positives, where they flag human-written content as AI-generated. Additionally, students may quickly learn how to evade detection by modifying some words or clauses in generated content.
Ultimately, we believe it will be necessary for students to learn how to navigate a world where tools like ChatGPT are commonplace… Some of this is STEM education, but much of it also draws on students’ understanding of ethics, media literacy, ability to verify information from different sources, and other skills from the arts, social sciences, and humanities.
Indeed, we are in a transitionary period where tools like OpenAI’s classifier are necessary. The most important work, now, will be figuring out how to integrate generative AI into education in healthy and productive ways. That’s the exciting part, too.