According to reports, OpenAI, the creator of the popular chatbot ChatGTP, has released a software tool to identify text generated by artificial intelligence.

ChatGPT is a free program that generates texting response to a prompt, including articles, essays, jokes and even poetry, which has gained wide popularity since its debut in November, while raising concerns about copyright and plagiarism.

The AI classifier, a language model trained on the dataset of pairs of human-written and AI-written text on the same topic, aims to distinguish text that is written by AI. It uses a variety of providers to address issues such as automated misinformation campaigns and academic dishonesty, the company says.

In its public beta mode, OpenAI acknowledges the detection tool is very unreliable on texts under 1,000 characters, and AI-written text can be edited to trick the classifier.

“We're making this classifier publicly available to get feedback on whether imperfect tools like this one are useful,” the company says.

Since ChatGPT debuted in November and gained wide popularity among millions of users, some of the largest U.S. school districts, including New York City, have banned the AI chatbot over concerns that students will use the text generator to cheat or plagiarize.

Others have created third-party detection tools including GPTZeroX to help educators detect AI-generated text.

ChatGPT suffers from multiple limitations. OpenAI acknowledged that ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. This behavior is common to large language models and is called hallucination.

The reward model of ChatGPT, designed around human oversight, can be over-optimized and thus hinder performance, otherwise known as Goodhart's law. ChatGPT has limited knowledge of events that occurred after 2021.

According to the BBC, as of December 2022 ChatGPT is not allowed to express political opinions or engage in political activism. Yet, research suggests that ChatGPT exhibits a pro-environmental, left-libertarian orientation when prompted to take a stance on political statements from two established voting advice applications in training ChatGPT, human reviewers preferred longer answers, irrespective of actual comprehension or factual content.

According to OpenAI, it is engaging with educators to discuss ChatGPT's capabilities and limitations, and will continue to work on the detection of AI-generated text.