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Right now, it’s hard to rely on apps that claim to detect ChatGPT writing
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On February 22, the creators of GPTZero, the app that’s meant to spot robot-writing, will be talking about the future of education with Unesco, the UN body that deliberates on issues related to education, arts, sciences and culture.
Unesco, like everyone else, must surely be following the ongoing debate over student assignments. How does a university teacher ensure that summative assessment submissions genuinely reflect the thoughts and learning of their student? How to prevent the temptation to turn in work penned by artificial intelligence generative text tools? How to spot copycat drivel?
Tools such as GPTZero are supposed to provide a solution and Edward Tian, the Princeton student who created it very recently, assures that it’s much smarter now. No longer fed a diet of news articles, the “updated GPTZero model [is] trained and tested with student written essays.”
Now fine-tuned, the product will be tailored “for educators worldwide”, writes Mr Tian, and has “a 99 per cent accuracy classifying human text as human, and 85 per cent classifying AI text”.
GPTZero used to have the tagline: Detect AI Plagiarism. Accurately
Now, it declares: Humans Deserve the Truth
Just like before, I immediately went on to GPTZero and tested it with a sonnet written by ChatGPT. (Incidentally, I got the same result on January 30, as well. The screen grabs are above.)
The result was near-instantaneous. And wrong!
Just like before, GPTZero said the sonnet was “likely to be written entirely by a human.”
At least for now, it may be hard to beat gut human intuition.
