OpenAI, the creator of the popular chatbot ChatGTP, has released a software tool to identify text generated by artificial intelligence, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday.

ChatGPT is a free program that generates text in response to a prompt, including articles, jokes, poetry and even programming code, which has gained wide popularity since its debut in November, while raising concerns about copyright and plagiarism.

The AI classifier, which is a language model trained on the dataset of pairs of human-written and AI-written text on the same topic, aims to distinguish text that is written by AI. 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, OpenAI acknowledges the detection tool is very unreliable on texts under 1,000 characters, and AI-written text can be edited to trick the classifier.

"We're making this classifier publicly available to get feedback on whether imperfect tools like this one are useful," OpenAI said.

"We recognize that identifying AI-written text has been an important point of discussion among educators, and equally important is recognizing the limits and impacts of AI generated text classifiers in the classroom."

Some of the largest U.S. school districts, including New York City, have banned the AI chatbot over concerns that students will use the text generator to cheat or plagiarize.

School districts around the country said they are seeing the conversation around ChatGPT evolve quickly.

"The initial reaction was 'OMG, how are we going to stem the tide of all the cheating that will happen with ChatGPT,'" said Devin Page, a technology specialist with the Calvert County Public School District in Maryland, U.S.

Now there is a growing realization that "this is the future" and blocking it is not the solution, he said.

"I think we would be naïve if we were not aware of the dangers this tool poses, but we also would fail to serve our students if we ban them and us from using it for all its potential power," said Page, who thinks districts like his own will eventually unblock ChatGPT, especially once the company's detection service is in place.

OpenAI said it is engaging with educators to discuss ChatGPT's capabilities and limitations, and will continue to work on the detection of AI-generated text.

Others have created third-party detection tools including GPTZeroX to help educators detect AI-generated text.

(With inputs from agencies)