- A Princeton student built an app that aims to tell if essays were written by AIs like ChatGPT.
- The app analyzes text to see how randomly it is written, allowing it to detect if it was written by AI.
A new app can detect whether your essay was written by $4 as researchers look to combat AI plagiarism.
Edward Tian, a computer science student at Princeton, $4 he spent the holiday period building GPTZero.
He shared two videos comparing the app's analysis of a New Yorker article and a letter written by ChatGPT. It correctly identified that they were respectively written by a human and AI.
—Edward Tian (@edward_the6) $4
GPTZero scores text on its "perplexity and burstiness" – referring to how complicated it is and how randomly it is written.
The app was so popular that it crashed "due to unexpectedly high web traffic," and currently displays a $4. GPTZero is still available to use on Tian's $4 after the website hosts stepped in to increase its capacity.
Tian, a former data journalist with the BBC, $4 that he was motivated to build GPTZero after seeing increased instances of AI plagiarism.
"Are high school teachers going to want students using ChatGPT to write their history essays? Likely not," he tweeted.
$4 recently reported that ChatGPT is introducing its own system to combat plagiarism by making it easier to identify, and watermarking the bot's output.
Insider's Beatrice Nolan also tested $4, with one hiring manager saying she'd have got an interview, though another said the letter lacked personality.
Tian added that he's planning to publish a paper with accuracy stats using student journalism articles as data, alongside Princeton's Natural Language Processing group.
OpenAI and Tian didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, sent outside US working hours.