3 main concerns of OpenAI’s text classifier
A new round of humans against the machines is here: OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has a text classifier, aimed at determining human- and AI-written content. This was their reaction to educators’ discussions about ChatGPT and its possible impact on academic integrity. Does it really work? There are several concerns to consider.
#1. Low accuracy
And by low, we mean “Can’t be trusted. At this stage, at least.” The developers themselves admit the tool can detect correctly only 26% of the text, composed by AI. This makes the classifier fail to detect artificial content in 74% of cases. At the same time, it “succeeds” at labeling 9% of texts, prepared by real people, as machine-generated. Here’s one of the examples of how the tool misses identifying an AI-written text: OpenAI AI Text Classifier – A GPT finetuned model to detect ChatGPT and AI Plagiarism.
One of the reasons for the high number of false positives and negatives can be the dataset behind the technology, as the classifier was trained only on the texts of the same topic, created by AI and people.
#2. Making student’s work available to the public
To make large language models like GPT-3 smarter and more precise, you need to “feed” them more content. OpenAI in general and its products in particular use the datasets from public access. Thus, when you submit your student’s paper to their classifier, it can be added to that dataset. From that moment, the assignment goes live and becomes potentially available to thousands of other users whose prompts will be specific enough. Next time some other student asks ChatGPT to generate an essay with a similar title or instructions, they can get a paraphrased or even an exact match of the paper you’ve submitted.
#3. Lightning-fast learning
Of AI, not people, unfortunately. The main concern here is that GPT-3 and other AI models are learning from each prompt. The more people interact with them and correct the outputs, the better results they deliver next time. Same story with your students’ papers: getting more inputs, ChatGPT can produce more human-like assignments. As a result, it may be harder to spot the text’s origin. The antidot to this is developing AI detecting software alond with AI technology evolvement.
Any solution to that?
Modern market offers multiple tools to provide accurate AI detection. TraceGPT by PlagiarismCheck.org is one of them. It provides:
- 97% accuracy;
- security: the submitted content is never published elsewhere or used to train AI model;
- constant updates and improvements;
- downloadable report where potentially AI content is highlighted.
