OpenAI has developed a system for "watermarking" the output that ChatGPT generates, reports The Wall Street Journal, but has chosen not to deploy it. Google has deployed such a system with Gemini.
OpenAI has a method to reliably detect when someone uses ChatGPT to write an essay or research paper. The company hasn't released it despite widespread concerns about students using artificial intelligence to cheat.
The project has been mired in internal debate at OpenAI for roughly two years and has been ready to be released for about a year, according to people familiar with the matter and internal documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. "It's just a matter of pressing a button," one of the people said.
OpenAI explains itself in a blog post, claiming that, contrary to the WSJ's report, though the system is 99.9% reliable with unedited text it's "trivial to circumvent."
Our teams have developed a text watermarking method that we continue to consider as we research alternatives.
While it has been highly accurate and even effective against localized tampering, such as paraphrasing, it is 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 – making it trivial to circumvention by bad actors.
Another important risk we are weighing is that our research suggests the text watermarking method has the potential to disproportionately impact some groups. For example, it could stigmatize use of AI as a useful writing tool for non-native English speakers.
The implications are that a) a selling point of AI is deception and we all know it, and b) anything more than local edits (paraphrasing or light editing) make it unreliable for even the experts to detect baked-in evidence of AI text or watermarks threaded into it. Current AI detectors are snake oil that seem good only for getting institutional users sued by those they falsely accuse or improperly penalize. The Journal's story centers on catching student plagiarists, bless their hearts!
