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OpenAI admits that AI writing detectors don’t work

Accepted submission by Freeman at 2023-09-08 16:36:12 from the burn it all down dept.
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https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/openai-admits-that-ai-writing-detectors-dont-work/ [arstechnica.com]

Last week, OpenAI published tips for educators [openai.com] in a promotional blog post that shows how some teachers are using ChatGPT [arstechnica.com] as an educational aid, along with suggested prompts to get started. In a related FAQ [openai.com], they also officially admit what we already know: AI writing detectors don't work, despite frequently being used to punish students [google.com] with false positives.

In a section of the FAQ titled "Do AI detectors work?", OpenAI writes [openai.com], "In short, no. While some (including OpenAI) have released tools that purport to detect AI-generated content, none of these have proven to reliably distinguish between AI-generated and human-generated content."

In July, we covered [arstechnica.com] in depth why AI writing detectors such as GPTZero don't work, with experts calling them "mostly snake oil."
[...]
That same month, OpenAI discontinued [arstechnica.com] its AI Classifier, which was an experimental tool designed to detect AI-written text. It had an abysmal 26 percent accuracy rate.


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