While ChatGPT has been keeping everyone awake at night, GPTzero is in the making
The internet is full of wild and crazy things. Over the years it has gotten more and more difficult to determine, let alone verify, if something is real or not. And this goes way beyond people posting 8-year old photos claiming that they are pictures of yesterday’s protest. No, with AI and photo manipulation, it is getting impossible to tell what is real anymore.
AI, while useful for many things, is becoming a nightmare for teachers and editors. Far too many people are trying to pass off a piece of writing as their own. Before I go on, let’s look at what plagiarism actually is. Merriam-Webster's online dictionary explains that to plagiarize is “to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own: use (another's production) without crediting the source [… or] to commit literary theft: present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source. So unless a student or a writer credits AI, the it is still defined as plagiarism. Th phrase ‘pass off as your own’ seals the deal.
Some of the newest AI systems out there can pass off as 90-100% human generated content quite easily, ChatGPT, which made its debut in November 2022, has very quickly become a sort of pandora's box on the internet. Every new technology has both good and bad sides to it, but ChatGPT has started to become a nightmare for educators, as well as creators and the corporate world alike.
Enter Edward Tian, who wrote the code for an new app called GPTZero in just three days. GPTZero can isolate AI generated content rather quickly. Edward is only 22, and invented the entire thing at a cafe over the holidays. GPTZero examines a piece for two variables in order to identify if text shown to it is written by a bot or human: perplexity and burstiness. Perplexity is a measurement of the randomness in text. `Burstiness compares variations of sentences.
Humans tend to write a lot differently than a computer. And while something can be said for busy marketing companies using AI to create content, the fact that students are using it to pass their education, makes GPT a problem. As long as it is credited to AI, it isn’t a drama. But the majority of the time, that is not the case.
Despite having studied AI, Tian, like the rest of us, was gobsmacked by the power of ChatGPT. He and his friends used it to write poems and raps about each other. "And it was like: 'Wow, these results are pretty good,'" Tian says. It seemed like everyone on campus was talking about how remarkable this new technology was. Sure, the text it generates is pretty formulaic and not always accurate. But it also feels like the beginning of a revolution.
“"I think we're absolutely at an inflection point, Tian says. "This technology is incredible. I do believe it's the future. But, at the same time, it's like we're opening Pandora's Box. And we need safeguards to adopt it responsibly."
Being able to write originally is an important skill, something that - like art - can never be replaced by a machine. And usually it is infinitely more beautiful and interesting than any computer can write. But you decide. Did i write this, or was it AI?
Edward Tian could probably tell you.
Stay tuned for the first thing we discover once we get our hands on GPTzero's educators' rollout for Educators.