I ran the essay through AI detection software. Within seconds, Copyleaks displayed the result on my screen and it was deeply disappointing: 95.9% of the text was likely AI-generated. I needed to be sure, so I ran it through another tool: Sapling, which identified 96.1% non-human text. ZeroGPT confirmed the first two, but was slightly lower in its scoring: 89% AI. So then I ran it through yet another software called Winston AI. It left no doubt: 1% human. Four separate AI detection softwares all had one clear message: this is an AI cheater. (...)
So, how might we spot the AI cheaters? Could there be cues and tells? Fortunately, new tools are emerging. However, as I would soon discover, the problem of AI fakery spans beyond the world of education – and technology alone won't be enough to respond to this change.
In the case of student cheating, the reassuring news is that teachers and educators already have existing tools and strategies that could help them check essays. For example, Turnitin, a plagiarism prevention software company that is used by educational institutions, released AI writing detection in April. Its CEO Chris Caren told me that the software's false positive rate (when it wrongly identifies human-written text as AI) stands at 1%.
There are also web tools like the ones I used to check my student essay – Copyleaks, Sapling, ZeroGPT and Winston AI. Most are free to use: you simply paste in text on their websites for a result. OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, released its own "AI classifier" in January.
How can AI detect another AI? The short answer is pattern recognition. The longer answer is that checkers use unique identifiers that differentiate human writing from computer-generated text. "Perplexity" and "Burstiness" are perhaps the two key metrics in AI text-sleuthing.
by Alex O'Brien, BBC | Read more:
Image: Getty
