This 22 year old is trying to save us from ChatGPT before he changes the style of writing forever.

While many Americans were recovering from New Year’s Day hangovers, Edward Tian, ​​22, was feverishly working on a new app to combat the misuse of a powerful new AI tool called ChatGPT.

Given the hype it’s created, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of ChatGPT. It is an interactive chatbot based on machine learning. This technology has practically consumed the entire Internet, reading the collective writings of humanity and learning patterns in the language it can recreate. All you have to do is give him a hint, and ChatGPT can do an infinite number of things: write a story in a certain style, answer a question, explain a concept, compose an email – write a college essay – and he’ll spit a coherent, seemingly human-written text in seconds.

The technology is both amazing and terrifying.

“I think we are absolutely at a tipping point,” Edward says. “This technology is incredible. I believe that the future lies with her. But at the same time, we seem to be opening a Pandora’s box. And we need precautions to take it responsibly.”

Edward is a graduate student at Princeton University, where he majors in computer science and, as a minor, majors in journalism. Prior to his recent emergence into the spotlight, Edward’s biggest plans were to graduate from college and have his wisdom teeth removed. Now he’s getting calls from venture capital firms, education leaders and the global media.

Over the past few years, Edward has been studying an artificial intelligence system called GPT-3, the predecessor to ChatGPT, which was less user-friendly and mostly inaccessible to the general public because it was behind a paywall. As part of his research this fall semester, Edward researched how to recognize text written by an AI system while working at the Princeton Natural Language Processing Lab.

Then, as the semester drew to a close, OpenAI, the company behind GPT-3 and other AI tools, released ChatGPT for free. For the millions of people around the world who have used it since then, interacting with the technology has been like looking into the future; a future that not so long ago would have seemed like science fiction.

Despite learning about AI, Edward, like the rest of us, was overwhelmed by the power of ChatGPT. He and his friends used it to write poetry and rap about each other. “And it was like, ‘Wow, those results are pretty good,'” Edward says. Everyone on campus seemed to be talking about how great this new technology was. Of course, the text it generates is rather formulaic and not always accurate. But it also feels like the start of a revolution.

For many users of the new technology, surprise quickly turned to alarm. How many jobs will it kill? Will it empower dishonest players and further distort our public discourse? How will this destroy our education system? What’s the point of learning to write essays in school if artificial intelligence, which is expected to get much better in the near future, can do it for us?

Stephen Marsh, writing Atlantic Ocean announced last month: “The college essay is dead.” He portrays ChatGPT and the AI ​​revolution as part of an existential crisis in the humanities. “Essays, especially student essays, have been at the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations,” Marquet writes. “This is how we teach children to explore, think and write. This whole tradition is about to be destroyed from scratch.”

edward vs machine

After the end of the fall semester, Edward went home to Toronto for the holidays. He hung out with his family. He watched Netflix. But he couldn’t help but think of the enormous problems facing humanity due to the rapidly developing AI.

And then he had an idea. What if he applied what he learned in school over the last couple of years to help the public determine if something was written by a machine?

Edward already had the know-how and even the software on his laptop to create such a program. Ironically, this software, called GitHub Co-Pilot, runs on GPT-3. With his help, Edward was able to create a new application in three days. This is evidence that this technology can make us more productive.

On January 2, Edward released his app. He named it GPTZero. It basically uses ChatGPT against itself, checking if there is “zero involvement or a lot of involvement” of the AI ​​system in the creation of a given text.

When Edward went to bed that night, he didn’t expect much from his application. “When I posted this, I just thought that at best a few dozen people would be able to try it,” Edward says. “I didn’t expect what happened.”

When Edward woke up, his phone exploded. He has seen countless messages and personal messages from journalists, principals, teachers and so on from places as far away as France and Switzerland. His app, hosted on a free platform, became so popular that it collapsed. Encouraged by the popularity and purpose of their app, the hosting platform has since provided Edward with the resources he needs to scale the app’s services to a mass audience.

The fight against the stigma of everything

Edward says he has several main motivations for creating GPTZero. The first is transparency. “People deserve to know when something is human or machine written,” he says.

So one obvious use for GPTZero is to help teachers determine if their students are plagiarizing their ChatGPT essays. “Teachers all over the world are concerned about this,” Edward says.

Some in the tech world, however, don’t quite understand that copying and pasting what ChatGPT spits out is a problem. “ChatGPT plagiarism is not a problem at all,” tweeted Mark Andreessen, venture capitalist and Internet pioneer, earlier this month. “If you can’t write more than a machine, then what do you do when you write?”

Elon Musk, one of the original co-founders of OpenAI, recently tweeted: “This is a new world. Goodbye homework!” in response to reports that schools are introducing strict new measures against ChatGPT plagiarism.

Of course, these are just flippant tweets. But it does seem that we have entered a new world where we are being forced to reassess our education system and even the value – or at least the method – of teaching children to write.

Many of us lost the will—even the ability—to remember phone numbers when cell phones came along. By transferring the memory to the machine, we became dependent on it to call our friends and family. You can tell it was for the best and it freed our minds to focus on other things. Or you can think of it as a kind of de-evolution, a dulling of our mental faculties. Don’t lose your mobile phone!

Now humanity faces the prospect of even greater dependence on machines. Perhaps we are moving towards a world in which even more of the population will lose the ability to write well. This is a world where all of our written communications can become a calling card, written without our own creativity, personality, ideas, emotions, or idiosyncrasies. Call it the branding of everything.

But at least when we give people Hallmark cards, people know we’re giving them Hallmark cards. If you use ChatGPT to write a congratulation or apology message to a friend, they may not even know that it was written by a machine.

This brings us to another goal that Edward sees in his application: to bring out and encourage originality in human writing. “We will lose that individuality if we stop teaching writing in schools,” Edward says. “Human writing can be so beautiful, and there are aspects that computers should never co-opt. And it seems like it could be in jeopardy if everyone uses ChatGPT for writing.”

Edward is not a Luddite. He doesn’t try to stop the AI. He believes this is not possible, and he says he opposes a total ban on ChatGPT, like the one recently announced in New York public schools. Students, in his opinion, will use this technology anyway. And, he says, it’s important that they can learn how to use it. They need to be aware of the technological changes that are sweeping our world. “It doesn’t make sense to blindly go into this future,” he says. “Instead, you need to build defense mechanisms to enter that future.”

As for his plans after college, Edward says the excitement – and the apparent demand – for his new app convinced him that he should focus on making it better and more accurate. “If you’re a teacher or educator, our team – which is currently just me and my best friend from college who just joined us yesterday – we’d love to talk to you,” Edward says.

So if you come across text that you suspect could be written by a machine, maybe run it through Edward’s new app? You can find it on GPTZero.me.

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