ChatGPT creators struggle to find the antidote

The start-up that created ChatGPT, the successful software capable of generating articles as well as poems or essays, is struggling to develop a program capable of detecting whether a text has been written by an artificial intelligence (AI) .

OpenAI on Tuesday launched a new open access tool to help humans distinguish between texts produced with AI-based software (like ChatGPT, but not only) and those written by people.

It must make it possible to identify, for example, if dissertations have been written by a computer program and not by a student or if you are addressing a human or a “chatbot” (conversational robot) in an online messaging system.

But it is currently “impossible to reliably detect all texts written with AI”, warns OpenAI from the outset in its press release.

According to its own assessment, the new software correctly identifies 26% of all texts written by algorithms as “probably written with AI”.

And in 9% of cases, it classifies texts written by humans as written with AI.

It is “much more reliable” than the previous version, underlines OpenAI, but it remains “very unreliable” on short texts (less than 1,000 characters) and it is better to use it in English.

Beyond the irony of this situation, the stakes are high.

Many experts fear that generative AI technologies, such as that of ChatGPT, are used in particular to automate the large-scale creation of scams or ultra-credible disinformation campaigns.

Similar tools have already been created with varying degrees of reliability, such as GPTZero, developed by Princeton University student Edward Tian.

OpenAI, a start-up co-founded in 2015 in San Francisco by Elon Musk – the boss of Tesla left the company in 2018 – launched ChatGPT last November.

The platform, easy to use, presents itself as a chatbot and produces stunning texts on simple request. Since then, it has been a resounding success, relayed by hyper media coverage.

The company was previously known only in limited circles, for two automated creation software, DALL-E for image generation and GPT-3 for text generation (ChatGPT is based on GPT-3).

She received $1 billion from Microsoft in 2019 and just struck a new deal with the multi-billion IT giant.