ChatGPT is a free app that generates text in response to a prompt, including articles, essays, jokes and even poetry. It has become spectacularly popular in the short time since its release in November, while simultaneously raising inevitable concerns about copyright and plagiarism.

The AI classifier, OpenAI's language model trained on the dataset of pairs of human-written and AI-written text on the same topic, aims to distinguish the text which was written by the latter. It uses a variety of providers to address issues such as automated misinformation campaigns and academic dishonesty, the company said.

In its public beta mode, announced in a blog post today (Wednesday 1 February), OpenAI acknowledges the detection tool is currently "very unreliable" on texts under 1,000 characters and that AI-written text can also be edited to trick the classifier.

"We’ve trained a classifier to distinguish between text written by a human and text written...