Workado, LLC

98 percent claimed. 53 percent measured.

Workado, an Arizona company formerly known as Content at Scale AI, sold an AI Content Detector advertised as predicting with 98 percent accuracy whether a piece of text was written by a generative AI system such as ChatGPT, GPT-4, Claude, or Bard.

According to the FTC’s administrative complaint, independent testing put the accuracy on general-purpose content at 53 percent.

That is the entire case, and it needs no interpretation. A detector at 53 percent on general text is, for practical purposes, a coin toss with a subscription fee.

What the FTC alleged

That the 98 percent claim was false, misleading, or unsubstantiated, in violation of the FTC Act.

The order

Workado is prohibited from making any representation about the effectiveness of a covered product unless the claim is not misleading and the company holds competent and reliable evidence sufficient in quantity, quality, and timeliness to support it at the time it is made. It must retain that evidence.

“Covered product” is defined broadly: any product incorporating technology that detects or purports to detect content, text or images, generated or altered in whole or part by artificial intelligence.

Workado must also file compliance reports one year after issuance and annually for three years after that. The order runs for 20 years.

The part worth reading twice

The order required Workado to email its own customers and tell them what happened. The prescribed notice says, in the company’s own voice, that it claimed a 98% accuracy rate and that the FTC says it did not have proof to back that up.

Requiring a company to inform the people it sold to, in plain language, is a sharper remedy than the money in most of these cases. Any vendor quoting an accuracy figure should assume that standard could apply to them.

The Commission vote to issue the complaint and accept the consent agreement was 3-0.

What is not established

A consent order resolves allegations without any admission or finding of wrongdoing.

We have not yet contacted Workado for comment. When we do, the attempt and any response will appear on this entry.