money OpenAI launched a second tool to complement ChatGPT – and help teachers detect cheating
The makers of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT said Tuesday they created a second tool to help distinguish between text written by a human and that written by its own AI platform and similar technology.
The new tool from San Francisco-based OpenAI could help teachers and professors detect when students use ChatGPT to cheat or plagiarize. Some of the largest school districts in the country have banned the technology, concerned students will use it as a shortcut for essays or other writing assignments and exams.
They also worry that the content it generates can bypass software that detects when students use information that's not their own work.
ChatGPT works like this: Simply ask the chatbot a question on any topic and get a speedy, detailed response in paragraph form. (GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer.) Sometimes its answers can be wrong, biased or out-of-date.
How does the new tool work?
Prassidh Chakraborty, a spokesperson for OpenAI, said the company wants to help students and educators benefit from its platform and doesn't want its chatbot "to be used for misleading purposes in schools or anywhere else."
The longer a passage of text, the better the tool is at detecting if an AI or human wrote something. Type in any text – a college admissions essay, or a literary analysis of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” – and the tool will label it as either “very unlikely, unlikely, unclear if it is, possibly, or likely” AI-generated.
'This shouldn't be a surprise': The education community shares mixed reactions to ChatGPT
The company created the tool "to help mitigate false claims that AI-generated text was written by a human," he said.
The company on its blog post Tuesday warned users that the tool isn't fully reliable, and creators want feedback.
"It still has a number of limitations," Chakraborty said. "So it should be used as a complement to other methods of determining the source of text instead of being the primary decision-making tool."
More: What is ChatGPT? Everything to know about OpenAI's free AI essay writer and how it works
Contributing: Associated Press
Contact Kayla Jimenez at kjimenez@usatoday.com. Follow her on Twitter at @kaylajjimenez.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: ChatGPT's creators launch second tool to help teachers detect plagiarism
