AI Detection versus Cryptographic Provenance
During SXSW 2023, Greg Brockman discussed how large language models (LLMs) challenge traditional notions of truth, authenticity, and creative ownership. The rise of AI-generated text, images, and even deepfake videos has made it increasingly difficult to distinguish what is real from what is artificially generated.
From news organizations to schools to user-generated content platforms, they are all clamoring for solutions to detect artificially generated content. So how do we prove what's real anymore?
This has led to the emergence of numerous startups and tools aiming to identify AI-generated text, images, audio, and video. As of March 2025, examples include GPTZero, Copyleaks, Decopy AI Detector, Scribbr AI Detector and more...
Some of these solutions claim 99% accuracy (until they quietly roll that number back after real-world tests). Others take the security theater approach, offering expensive enterprise solutions that amount to a probabilistic guess wrapped in a glossy UI.