OpenAI has developed technology to reliably detect AI-generated text, according to inside sources and documents reported by the Wall Street Journal. However, the company is reluctant to release it, likely due to concerns about its own business model.
The detection rate is worthless, an algorithm that says anything is Chatgpt would have a detection rate of 100%. What would be more interesting than that is the false positive rate but they never talk about that.
The detector provides an assessment of how likely it is that all or part of the document was written by ChatGPT. Given a sufficient amount of text, the method is said to be 99.9 percent effective.
That means given 100 pieces of text and asked if they are made by ChatGPT or not, it gets maybe one of them wrong.
Allegedly, that is, and with the caveat of "sufficient amount of text", whatever that means.
A false positive is when it incorrectly determines that a human written text is written by AI. While a detection rate of 99.9% sounds impressive, it’s not very reliable if it comes with a false positive rate of 20%.