OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, announced Wednesday that it will launch a $20 per-month subscription plan for its AI-driven chatbot, ChatGPT Plus. Subscribers will receive access to ChatGPT during peak times, faster responses, and priority access to new features and improvements. 

In a blog post published by OpenAI on Wednesday, the company introduced ChatGPT Plus, which will be initially rolling out only for customers in the United States. The company will soon extend the access availability through inviting people from its waitlist, probably over the coming weeks. OpenAI will also be rolling out ChatGPT to more regions in the near future. 

Among the benefits of ChatGPT Plus are normal access to the platform during peak usage, faster response times, and priority access to upcoming features and improvements. Until the rollout of the subscription plan to other regions, the company will continue to provide free access to its users. 

On Wednesday, OpenAI also has released a software tool to identify text generated by artificial intelligence. The ChatGPT program generates text in response to a prompt, including articles, essays, jokes, and even poetry, and has gained wide popularity since it launched in November, despite concerns about plagiarism and copyright.

The AI classifier, which uses pairs of human-written and AI-written text on the same topic, aims to distinguish between texts written by AI and those written by humans. 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. 

Since ChatGPT debuted in November and gained wide popularity among millions of users, some of the largest US school districts, including New York City, have banned the AI chatbot over concerns that students will use the text generator to cheat or plagiarise. 

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

A spokesperson for OpenAI said that it has been in contact with educators to discuss the capabilities and limitations of ChatGPT and is working on detecting artificially generated text.