Ever since the explosion of news and interest around the launch of ChatGPT, there have been serious concerns around whether it will be used by students – including law students – to cheat on their exams, with New York City in January banning access to ChatGPT in schools.
As with every ‘problem’ there is bound to emerge a technological solution: step up the GPTZero app, which claims to be able to check if a piece of text is written by AI or a human.
Created ‘over new years’ by Princeton computer science major Edward Tian, the app – which was launched on 3 January and struggled to cope with the volume of interest on day one – measures factors including ‘perplexity’ – the more complex it is, the more likely to have been written by a human; and ‘burstiness’ – machine written text exhibit more uniform and constant perplexity over time, while human text varies.
GPTZero compared a New Yorker article with a ChatGPT article, and it got it right. The app went down under the weight of its web traffic but was given more memory by free hosting company Steamlit and Tian announced that it was back up on 5 January.
The app has received varying reviews as to its accuracy, but the New York Times reported yesterday (16 January) that more than 6,000 teachers from Harvard University, Yale University, the University of Rhode Island and others have already signed up to use GPTZero.
The news comes as Microsoft reportedly considers investing $10bn in OpenAI – the company behind GPT-3 and ChatGPT – and looks to integrate ChatGPT into its web search engine Bing – a move that would give Google a run for its money.
The investment – news of which is so far speculative and was first broken by global newsletter Semafor – would value OpenAI at $29bn.
What is definite is that Microsoft yesterday announced the general availability of Azure OpenAI Service, which debuted in November 2021 and can now be used by customers in the creation of their own apps. Customers will also soon be able to access ChatGPT through the Azure OpenAI service.
Let us know your thoughts on the use of GPT/ChatGPT within Microsoft or elsewhere by messaging me on caroline@legaltechnology.com