Skip to main content

ChatGPT has a new way to detect its own plagiarism

OpenAI announced on Tuesday a new tool called AI Text Classifier, which is intended to distinguish between AI-generated text and words that were written by a human.

The brand’s latest tool comes after criticism of its ChatGPT text generator. While it has been popular since its November 2022 release, the chatbot has been embroiled in plagiarism concerns, with the tool already being banned from schools. However, reports have also surfaced of students using ChatGPT to create essays for take-home assignments.

Related Videos
Text determined AI written on AI Text Classifier.

Making the AI Text Classifier available is OpenAI’s effort to keep its brand honest. OpenAI said in a blog post that it would like feedback from parents and teachers on the quality of its plagiarism-detection tool. However, it does note that the Classifier has some limitations at the moment, including not working well for texts shorter than 1,000 words, not working well for languages other than English, being easily duped if AI text is edited, and producing false positives, where the tool incorrectly identifies a human-written text as AI, among others.

OpenAI added that the Classifier has an approximate 26% rate of correctly identifying an AI text as likely AI-written (true positives),and a 9% instance of incorrectly identifying a human text as AI-written (false positives).

Text determined human written on AI Text Classifier.

When testing the AI Text Classifier, I compared the ChatGPT prompt “write a 1,000-word essay on the number of stars in the sky” to the text from my article “The 6 biggest problems with ChatGPT right now.”

Logging into the Classifier is easy if you already have an OpenAI account and servers are not congested. You just paste your text into the text box and select submit. The result will display below. The tool accurately identified the text from my article as human-written and the ChatGPT-written text as AI-written.

There are a number of other plagiarism-detection tools already available, with varying degrees of accuracy. GPT-2 Output Detector is another tool developed by OpenAI. Others include Writer AI, Content at Scale, GPTZero, and Giant Language Model Test Room (GLTR). We tested these tools and similarly found varying degrees of accuracy between the identification of ChatGPT text and human text.

It’s not clear how the AI Text Classifier will be implemented moving forward, but ChatGPT is already solidifying itself in several industries, from journalism to business and technology. With all the proper tools in place, it likely just becomes a matter of ethics.

Editors' Recommendations

ChatGPT was down nearly all day, chat history still in progress
Close up of ChatGPT and OpenAI logo.

ChatGPT had been down for most of the day, creating an unsettling moment for the large number of people that have come to rely on the advanced AI for help with writing and coding, as well as assistance on a variety of topics.

The outage included for paid subscribers of ChatGPT Plus, which was supposed to provide priority status during peak times.

Read more
Check your inbox — Google may have invited you to use Bard, its ChatGPT rival
ChatGPT versus Google on smartphones.

AI chatbots have been the subject of much public fascination as of late, with the likes of ChatGPT continuously making headlines. But now, Google is finally getting in on the trend by soft-launching Bard for select Pixel users.

Bard is Google's AI chatbot that was previously unavailable to the public, but according to a report from 9to5Google, the company is inviting some of its most loyal and dedicated customers to give it a try.

Read more
Here’s the ChatGPT word limit and how to get around it
A laptop opened to the ChatGPT website.

Fans of ChatGPT adore the AI chatbot for several purposes, including its ability to generate detailed essays in a matter of seconds. However, one of its little-known limitations is that there is a word and character limit set on how much content it can output per query.
Reddit members and other AI enthusiasts have been discussing this for months, and luckily there are easy workarounds for this limitation by way of the prompts you can use.

What is the ChatGPT word limit?
ChatGPT's parent company, OpenAI. set the word and character limit as part of its ongoing development of the AI chatbot, which is still in its research preview phase. Some of the issues with ChatGPT include its affinity toward "social biases, hallucinations, and adversarial prompts," in addition to producing inaccurate content when the AI algorithm is overwhelmed or at a loss for information to process.
Similarly, ChatGPT might simply stop producing content when the request is too complex for the AI to handle. This happens at about 500 words or 4,000 characters. If you happen to give the chatbot a request for a specific number of words above 500, you might find that it cuts off midsentence somewhere after 500 words.

Read more