mayaskIn the realm of world-altering technologies, ChatGPT has undeniably made an enormous impact on the way people perceive writing and coding within the brief period it has been accessible.
Contents
- What is GPTZero?
- Is GPTZero free?
- Is GPTZero accurate?
- How does GPTZero work?
- How can I use GPTZero?
- Alternatives to GPTZero
- Why is my writing being flagged as AI?
- Do we really need plagiarism checks?
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However, this remarkable ability comes with a considerable drawback, especially in the field of education. Here, students are enticed to employ ChatGPT for their papers or exams. Such plagiarism hinders students from attaining maximum learning and presents teachers with a fresh conundrum: how to detect the use of AI.
Teachers and other users are now actively seeking methods to identify the utilization of ChatGPT in students’ work, and many are turning to tools such as GPTZero, a ChatGPT detection tool developed by Edward Tian, a student from Princeton University. This software is accessible to all. So, if you wish to give it a try and determine the likelihood that a specific text was composed using ChatGPT, here’s how you can proceed.
What is GPTZero?
MidJourney
GPTZero is a web application and service engineered to determine whether a body of text was composed by a human or an artificial intelligence. Currently, the system ostensibly can detect the outputs from various large language models including ChatGPT, GPT-4, and Claude, as well as identify if it was written by a human in collaboration with an AI.
It was developed and initially released in January 2023 by Edward Tian, a 22-year-old undergraduate studying computer science at Princeton University and a former software engineering intern at Microsoft. While announcing the platform on X (formerly Twitter), Tian noted that the analysis was based on the research of Princeton Ph.D. candidate Sreejan Kumar, and the work of Princeton’s Natural Language Processing Group.
the analysis is based on some ongoing research with and @sreejan_kumar and @princeton_nlp. hopefully we’ll publish something empirical soon. but in the mean time this was a fun app to make 🙂
— Edward Tian (@edward_the6) January 3, 2023
Is GPTZero free?
GPTZero was designed for educators, but anyone can utilize it for free. With a free account, you can scan 40 documents per hour and access the GPTZero dashboard. The $10/month Essential plan will scan up to 150,000 words per month, and grant access to “premium” AI detection models as well as “plagiarism scanning” and “Advanced Grammar and Writing” feedback. The $16/month Premium package increases the word count to 300,000 per month and offers an “Advanced AI Deep Scan” and multilingual AI detection in addition to the Pro-level benefits. The top-tier $16/month Professional subscription allocates 500,000 words per month with another 10 million words “in overage.” That’s an extensive amount of perceived plagiarism.
Is GPTZero accurate?
Although GPTZero promotes its service as highly proficient, some users have discovered that the service’s accuracy “is inconsistent, often mislabeling human-written text as AI-generated and struggling with certain types of generated text.” Following a suggestion from Reddit user Smellz_Of_Elderberry, I asked ChatGPT to pen a brief story about the book The Old Man and the Sea as if it were a high school student. GPTZero wasn’t deceived.
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I attempted again, modifying the text with some misplaced punctuation, incorrect verb tense, and other minor errors, but GPTZero still asserted, “your text is likely to be written entirely by AI.”
The scan accurately identified the AI origins of a passage even when using text generators other than Claude or GPT-4. I had Gemini 1.5 Pro write a separate report on The Old Man and the Sea but GPTZero detected it as well.
The accuracy of GPTZero is still under assessment, but based on these anecdotal tests, it appears to be functioning effectively.
If you employ GPTZero, it’s crucial to keep in mind that errors are possible. When using GPTZero to detect AI or ChatGPT to assist in writing a document, you still need to inspect the work for mistakes.
How does GPTZero work?
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GPTZero analyzes the randomness of text, known as perplexity, and the uniformity of this randomness within the text, which is termed burstiness in statistics. An AI is highly consistent in its perplexity and burstiness, while human writers vary these characteristics unconsciously.
The work is ongoing, and Tian notes that more tests will be added to enhance the accuracy of AI text detection. In particular, implicit bias is an area being explored as an additional means to detect if the text is generated by an AI.
we’re still studying implicit bias in LM generated text right now, so hopefully will be adding a few more tests and factors to improve the model
— Edward Tian (@edward_the6) January 3, 2023
How can I use GPTZero?
GPTZero is accessible on its website. Simply copy the text you wish to inspect and paste it into the large box labeled Try it out.
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It’s also feasible to upload a PDF, Word document, or text file and click the Get Results button. You’ll also need to check the box signifying your agreement to the terms of service.
Alternatives to GPTZero
GPTZero isn’t the sole AI-powered plagiarism detector available in the market today. OpenAI offers its GPT-2 Output Detector and is reportedly developing an updated version, though there’s no information on when or if it will be released. Content at Scale AI Content Detection, ZeroGPT (not sure how that made it past the trademark office), Writefull GPT Detector, and Originality.ai all provide similar services with varying degrees of accuracy.
Why is my writing being flagged as AI?
Alongside the rise of ChatGPT and the emergence of AI detection tools, both writers and readers now have a new concern about how to determine if content is AI-created and whether genuine writing is being labeled as coming from an AI. This is particularly an issue for students, who could face consequences from their schools or universities if they are found to be using AI. Some students are now habitually running their own original work through detectors like GPTZero and discovering that it is flagging up sentences as AI-written even if they weren’t.
In 2024, a writer for The Atlantic, Ian Bogost, described running his own original work through plagiarism detection software and finding that initially, a staggering 74% of his work was flagged as plagiarized. With meticulous checking and elimination, he managed to reduce that number to zero, but it took him several hours of review and settings adjustments to achieve this.
AI detection is similar to plagiarism detection, in that both can only offer the best estimates as to whether a piece of writing is original and human-generated or not. And these tools require a great deal of careful review, as both can tend to produce false positives. If you find that your work is being flagged as AI-generated on GPTZero when it wasn’t, then this could be for reasons as broad as not being a native English speaker, being overly repetitive with your ideas, or having utilized a tool like Grammarly.
If your work is being flagged as AI, double-check that you have all your quotes and citations formatted correctly, and try to avoid using automatic tools like Grammarly for making edits.
And remember, this is GPTZero’s black box, “trade secret” proprietary algorithm that’s claiming your writing statistically resembles other examples found throughout the entire public internet. The company isn’t going to explain how its product actually operates, or demonstrate that it does so accurately, in a court of law. So if you do find yourself in jeopardy over alleged generative plagiarism, it’ll be your word against theirs. Hire a lawyer and make them prove their work.
Do we really need plagiarism checks?
Extending far beyond the research laboratories where many text-generation AIs have been confined, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public in late November 2022. By January 2023, ChatGPT had surpassed 100 million users, making it the fastest-growing public application to date.
This implies that any concerns regarding plagiarism are only going to escalate as this AI assistance becomes accessible in all aspects of life. Microsoft is integrating OpenAI’s technology into Bing search, and Google is testing its own version, known as Gemini (formerly Bard).
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On a related note, AI image generators like Dall-E and Stable Diffusion are under examination for potential copyright infringements. All of these artificial intelligence services have been trained on the writing, photographs, and artwork available online that have been created by billions of humans.
In a sense, AI is borrowing from human intelligence rather than creating independently. If I borrow from another human, I must give credit and potentially pay a licensing fee. With generative AI, it becomes more challenging to cite a source because each text or image is broken down into diffuse elements and then reassembled to create a new piece using thousands or millions of sources.
We either need to reevaluate our perspective on copyright and plagiarism or discover tools that assist in identifying AI-generated material and potentially develop a method of giving credit to the vast number of people who contribute to every AI-generated work.
