OpenAI has built a tool that could potentially catch students who cheat by asking ChatGPT to write their assignments — but according to The Wall Street Journal, the company is debating whether to actually release it.
In a statement provided to TechCrunch, an OpenAI spokesperson confirmed that the company is researching the text watermarking method described in the Journal’s story, but said it’s taking a “deliberate approach” to due to “the complexities involved and its likely impact on the broader ecosystem beyond OpenAI.”
“The text watermarking method we’re developing is technically promising, but has important risks we’re weighing while we research alternatives, including susceptibility to circumvention by bad actors and the potential to disproportionately impact groups like non-English speakers,” the spokesperson said.
This would be a different approach from most previous efforts to detect AI-generated text, which have been largely ineffective. Even OpenAI itself shut down its previous AI text detector last year due to its “low rate of accuracy.”
With text watermarking, OpenAI would focus solely on detecting writing from ChatGPT, not from other companies’ models. It would do so by making small changes to how ChatGPT selects words, essentially creating an invisible watermark in the writing that could later be detected by a separate tool.
Following the publication of the Journal’s story, OpenAI also updated a May blog post about its research around detecting AI-generated content. The update says text watermarking has proven “highly accurate and even effective against localized tampering, such as paraphrasing,” but has proven “less robust against globalized tampering; like using translation systems, rewording with another generative model, or asking the model to insert a special character in between every word and then deleting that character.”
As a result, OpenAI writes that this method is “trivial to circumvention by bad actors.” OpenAI’s update also echoes the spokesperson’s point about non-English speakers, writing that text watermarking could “stigmatize use of AI as a useful writing tool for non-native English speakers.”
COVID-19 pushed people to take up outdoor activities. Now, startups are helping companies and consumers keep up with demand.
Despite increasing demand for AI safety and accountability, today’s tests and benchmarks may fall short, according to a new report. Generative AI models — models that can analyze and output…
OpenAI has built a tool that could potentially catch students who cheat by asking ChatGPT to write their assignments — but according to The Wall Street Journal, the company is…
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway cut its Apple holding by around half, to $84.2 billion, according to an SEC filing. While Apple remains the firm’s largest stock holding by far, Buffett…
A fireside chat between Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg at SIGGRAPH 2024 took some unexpected turns. What started as a conversation about the capabilities of Nvidia GPUs and Zuckerberg’s vision…
We spoke to Harness CEO and founder Jyoti Bansal about his previous company, which Cisco bought for $3.7 billion in 2017.
Dojo is Tesla’s custom-built supercomputer that’s designed to train its “Full Self-Driving” neural networks.
Investors are assisting startup founders earlier than ever in an effort to help them bridge the first climate tech valley of death.
While both the DSA and DMA aim to achieve distinct things, they are best understood as a joint response to Big Tech’s market power.
Self-driving technology company Aurora Innovation was hoping to raise hundreds of millions in additional capital as it races toward a driverless commercial launch by the end of 2024. The company, which…
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department are suing TikTok and ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, with violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The law requires digital…
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. This week we are looking at acquisitions of small startups, two new…
In a big move, Character.AI co-founder and CEO Noam Shazeer is returning to Google after leaving the company in October 2021 to found the a16z-backed chatbot startup. In his previous…
When the developers replied to the July 19 email, Yelp sent a deck of pricing tiers with base pricing starting from $229 per month for a limit of 1,000 API…
Featured Article
Cloud infrastructure revenue approached $80 billion this quarter
The cloud infrastructure market has put the doldrums of 2023 firmly behind it with another big quarter. Revenue continues to grow at a brisk pace, fueled by interest in AI. Synergy Research reports revenue totaled $79 billion for the quarter, up $14.1 billion or 22% from last year. This marked…
The pharma giant won’t say how many patients were affected by its February data breach. A count by TechCrunch confirms that over a million people are affected.
Payments infrastructure firm Infibeam Avenues has acquired a majority 54% stake in Rediff.com for up to $3 million, a dramatic twist of fate for the 28-year-old business that was the…
The ruling confirmed an earlier decision in April from the High Court of Podgorica which rejected a request to extradite the crypto fugitive to the United States.
A day after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about his newest social media experiment Threads reaching “almost” 200 million users on the company’s Q2 2024 earnings call, the platform has…
TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 will be in San Francisco on October 28–30, and we’re already excited! Disrupt brings innovation for every stage of your startup journey, and we could not bring you this…
Featured Article
A comprehensive list of 2024 tech layoffs
The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the…
Intel announced it would lay off more than 15% of its staff, or 15,000 employees, in a memo to employees on Thursday. The massive headcount is part of a large…
Following the recent lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against music generation startups Udio and Suno, Suno admitted in a court filing on Thursday that it did, in…
