College student claims app can detect essays written by chatbot ChatGPT

A 22-year-old college student has developed an app which he claims can detect whether text is written by ChatGPT, the explosive chatbot raising fears of plagiarism in academia.

Edward Tian, a senior at Princeton University, developed GPTZero over a summer break. It had 30,000 hits within a week of its launch.

Tian said the motivation was to address the use of artificial intelligence to evade anti-plagiarism software to cheat in exams with quick and credible academic writing.

Streamlit, the free platform that hosts GPTZero, has since supported Tian with hosting and memory capabilities to keep up with web traffic.

Tian told subscribers the newer model used the same principles, but with an improved capacity to detect artificial intelligence in text.

Meanwhile, he said each app developed to spot synthetic texts gave greater ability for artificial intelligence programs to evade detection.

And each time a user logged on to ChatGPT, it was generating human feedback to improve filters, both implicitly and explicitly.

Users of GPTZero have cited mixed results.