Microsoft has announced it will add “cryptographic” watermarks to all AI-generated content, in a bid to stem confusion between material generated by its machines and that of humans.

The company is also bringing the Bing search engine into ChatGPT, meaning users can get up-to-date answers from the chat bot soon; ChatGPT was originally trained on data up to September, 2021.

This service will come to the premium ChatGPT Plus service from today, and will be available on the regular version soon.

Microsoft unveiled the Bing ChatGPT updates yesterday at a developer conference in Seattle.

The “cryptographic” watermarks Microsoft intends to roll out on AI-generated content will also be available to developers to use, and are designing to stop confusion as to whether information and art was generated with AI.

“We’re giving you a bunch of amazing media provenance tools that will help users understand when they are seeing generated content or not,” Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott told attendees.

Scott did not explain how the technology would work, or how these watermarks would be visible.