OpenAI, the creator of the wildly popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT, has shut down the tool it developed to detect content created by AI rather than humans. The tool, dubbed AI Classifier, has been shuttered just six months after it was launched due to its “low rate of accuracy,” OpenAI said.
Since ChatGPT and rival services have skyrocketed in popularity, there has been a concerted pushback from various groups concerned about the consequences of unchecked AI usage. For one thing, educators have been particularly troubled by the potential for students to use ChatGPT to write their essays and assignments, then pass them off as their own.
OpenAI’s AI Classifier was an attempt to allay the fears of these and other groups. The idea was it could determine whether a piece of text was written by a human or an AI chatbot, giving people a tool to both assess students fairly and combat disinformation.
Yet even from the start, OpenAI did not seem to have much confidence in its tool. In a blog post announcing the tool, OpenAI declared that “Our classifier is not fully reliable,” noting that it correctly identified AI-written texts from a “challenge set” just 26% of the time.
The decision to drop the tool was not given much fanfare, and OpenAI has not posted a dedicated post on its website. Instead, the company has updated the post which revealed the AI Classifier, stating that “the AI classifier is no longer available due to its low rate of accuracy.”
The update continued: “We are working to incorporate feedback and are currently researching more effective provenance techniques for text, and have made a commitment to develop and deploy mechanisms that enable users to understand if audio or visual content is AI-generated.”
The AI Classifier is not the only tool that has been developed to detect AI-crafted content, as rivals like GPTZero exist and will continue to operate, despite OpenAI’s decision.
Past attempts to identify AI writing have backfired spectacularly. For instance, in May 2023, a professor mistakenly flunked their entire class after enlisting ChatGPT to detect plagiarism in their students’ papers. Needless to say, ChatGPT got it badly wrong, and so did the professor.
It’s cause for concern when even OpenAI admits it can’t properly perceive plagiarism created by its own chatbot. It comes at a time of increasing anxiety about the destructive potential of AI chatbots and calls for a temporary suspension of development in this field. If AI has as much of an impact as some people are predicting, the world is going to need stronger tools than OpenAI’s failed AI Classifier.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Google DeepMind's AI world model Genie 4 can now build interactive worlds that you can explore and reshape as they run. It also generates ambient sounds, music, and dialogue that respond to your actions.
The new world model builds on Genie 3 with improved realism, more natural human movement, and better simulations of real-world physics. It could eventually help with everything from game development to training robots.
Apple has an incredible talent for making me admire its products while simultaneously questioning what on earth it's thinking with the pricing. This isn't even something as bizarre as a monitor stand, but the audacity for starting a new laptop lineup from $2,000 doesn't surprise me.
The newly announced 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 is just the latest to showcase this. The funny thing is, I already know that it's going to be a reliable workstation. You get a powerful new 2nm M6 processor, a gorgeous Liquid Retina XDR display, and up to 24 hours of battery life. We were impressed by the M5 MacBook Air, so the high-end M6 powered MacBook Pro definitely won't let us down.