A 22-year-old created an app that claims to detect text generated by ChatGPT—and he did it over a weekend.
The tool is called GPTZero and it's the brainchild of Edward Tian, a senior at Princeton University.
Tian created the app to combat the misuse of ChatGPT, specifically in schools. The app works by looking at two variables in a piece of text: “perplexity” and “burstiness.”
- Perplexity — The app measures how familiar it is with the text, based on what it has seen during its own training. The less familiar it is with the text, the higher the chance it was written by a human and not a machine.
- Burstiness — The app scans the text to see how much variation is in it. (Is there a mix of short and long sentences, etc.?) The more variable, the more likely it is to be human-generated.
Tian’s work is impressive. But it also has bigger takeaways for marketing and business leaders.
In Episode 31 of the Marketing AI Show, Marketing AI Institute founder/CEO Paul Roetzer broke it down for me…
1. Get ready for the AI writing arms race.
Other companies have already updated their products to include GPTZero-like functionality.
Educators report that Turnitin, a popular plagiarism checker, offers ways to detect AI-generated content. Google has used AI for awhile to flag AI-written content in search. And AI writing tools are getting better by the day.
This is resulting in an arms race between AI tools that increasingly write like humans and the tools trying to detect them.
There likely won’t be a clear winner here, just an escalating battle to determine what is and isn’t generated by AI.
2. The speed of innovation will be breathtaking.
ChatGPT was released November 30, 2022. In just a couple months, it has changed the world. GPTZero was built by a single student in a weekend and thousands of educators now use it. Turnitin has already evolved their product in light of ChatGPT and GPTZero.
Whatever speed you’re used to in innovation cycles, AI-driven ones will be faster.
This will make your choices as a brand and business leader more important than ever.
“It’s going to be on individual brands and media companies to be proactive in defining how they’re using AI,” says Roetzer.
3. The last thing you want to do is remove humans from the writing process.
“You should use AI to enhance and augment what you’re doing as a writer,” says Roezter. “But it shouldn’t remove the human in the loop.”
Now that tools like ChatGPT can write anything at a human level, the emotions and human experiences that go into great writing just became even more valuable.
People will increasingly seek originality in both content and perspectives. There will also be a new value placed on writing that you know is written by a human. (There may even be scores assigned to writing in the near future, telling you exactly how much was written by a human.)
That will make it more important than ever for your brand to become more human in its writing and content. It will be the only sustainable advantage in a world of AI-generated content at scale.
“What technology always comes down to is it gives humans these powers and then they have to choose how they’re going to use those powers,” says Roezter. “These are just more powerful than anything we’ve had before when it comes to this realm.”
How to get ahead of these changes
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