Student creates tool that exposes AI-generated text

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A new app can detect if text is AI-written or not. It’s called GPTZero and is intended to sniff out content written by OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

That’s the AI-powered writing tool that uses OpenAI’s natural language model to respond to questions.

Since ChatGPT’s release, teachers and journalists have worried about the ethical implications. The AI can hold conversations, generate code, or answer questions.

The AI can also write essays. That’s a big problem for teachers or professors who grade students’ work. How do they know if their student or an AI wrote the text?

Enter GPTZero, which uses OpenAI’s GPT-2 model to scan written text.

GPTZero fights AI-written text with more AI

Here’s an example of Edward’s tool in action, checking against an essay in The New Yorker.

here’s a quick demo with john mcphee’s “frame of reference” pic.twitter.com/WphxfxxFdr

— Edward Tian (@edward_the6) January 3, 2023

The GPTZero tool scans the text and gives scores based on perplexity and burstiness. Higher scores indicate that a human wrote the text.

Perplexity is a fancy way of saying randomness. The AI model in ChatGPT favors simple sentence structures. GPTZero gives simple, unsurprising sentences a lower score.

Burstiness also links to randomness, this time for the text’s overall structure. AI chatbots tend to use similar sentences throughout the text. Humans, on the other hand, favor random complexity shifts.

The thing is, Edward Tian, the student who created the anti-AI-writing tool, isn’t against AI in general. He uses CoPilot to “support much of [his] coding” (via The Daily Beast).

He wants the AI tools to be ethical and used with consent. Maybe with tools to check for AI-written text, it will be.

In the future, GPTZero will have a “tailored solution for educators.” If you want to see what that might look like, you can head to GPTZero and try their “Classic” version, which will be permanently free to use.

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Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.