London, Jun 14 (IANS): Elon Musk-co-founded Artificial Intelligence startup OpenAI has released its first commercial product, a programme to make use of a text-generation tool that it once called too dangerous.

So it has the potential to spare people from writing long texts. Once an application is developed on the basis of the programme, all they need to give is a prompt.

What is special about the model is that readers might not be able to make out that the text was not produced by a human.

OpenAI released the product as an application programming in a private beta rather than general availability.

This is because OpenAI said it cannot imagine all of the possible consequences of this technology.

OpenAI earlier desisted from revealing more about the software fearing bad actors might misuse it for producing misleading articles, impersonate others or even automate phishing content.

"In releasing the API, we are working closely with our partners to see what challenges arise when AI systems are used in the real world," OpenAI said in a blog post last week.

"This will help guide our efforts to understand how deploying future AI systems will go, and what we need to do to make sure they are safe and beneficial for everyone."

The API that OpenAI finally decided to release provides a general-purpose "text in, text out" interface, allowing users to try it on virtually any English language task.

Interested buyers can integrate the API into their product and develop an entirely new application.

"Given any text prompt, the API will return a text completion, attempting to match the pattern you gave it. You can 'program' it by showing it just a few examples of what you'd like it to do; its success generally varies depending on how complex the task is," OpenAI said.