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OpenAI, the research laboratory behind AI program ChatGPT, has released a tool designed to detect whether text has been written by artificial intelligence but warns it’s not completely reliable - yet, The Guardian has reported.

In a recent blog post, OpenAI linked to a new classifier tool that has been trained to distinguish between text written by a human and that written by a variety of AI, not just ChatGPT. Open AI researchers said that while it was ‘impossible to reliably detect all AI-written text’ good classifiers could pick up signs that text was written by AI. The tool could be useful in cases where AI was used for ’academic dishonesty’ and when AI chatbots were positioned as humans.

However, they admited that the classifier ‘is not fully reliable’ and only correctly identified 26% of AI-written English texts. It also incorrectly labelled human-written texts as probably written by AI tools nine per cent of the time. ’Our classifier’s reliability typically improves as the length of the input text increases. Compared to our previously released classifier, this new classifier is significantly more reliable on text from more recent AI systems.’

Since ChatGPT was opened up to public access it has sparked a wave of concern among educational institutions across the world that it could lead to cheating in exams or assessments.

As reported by Tech Crunch, for the first time since 2014 venture capital funding to European edtech startups saw a decline, year-on-year, with startups only raking in $1.8bn in 2022 compared to $2.5bn a year earlier.

The global ecosystem has been on an upward trajectory, albeit less consistently, but the declines in new investment in 2022 were steep; global funding declined to $9.1bn last year, from $20.1bn in 2021.

Perceived declines in funding are being felt more acutely, given that 2021 was a boom year. Optimism that the pandemic was coming to an end, and that the world was reopening, extended to ambitious founders and early teams. This momentum carried through to the first half of 2022 for European edtech - funding was up 40% in the first six months of last year compared to a year earlier - but, as we now know, that momentum faltered in the second half of 2022. Optimism ebbed away, and European edtech startups raised only about $400m in the final six months compared to $1.4bn in the first half of the year.