AI Content Detection Booms to Counter “ChatGPT Wrote My Homework”

GPTZero is the leading specialized tool for academics, but anti-plagiarism players like Turnitin are also in the race — and the concern is not only academic

The boom in generative AI text generators that can write essays and resumes has spurred a counterbalancing boom in whether AI wrote an essay, a job application cover letter, or a sales pitch email. While there are legitimate roles for tools like ChatGPT to play in education and business, everyone wants to know whether what they’re reading is the work of a bot as opposed to the student, potential employee, or salesperson.

Key takeaways

• GPT Zero (gptzero.me), which was invented by a Princeton undergraduate and launched at the beginning of January, attracted 5.5 million visits in April and is on track to top 5.9 million for May, according to Similarweb estimates. That makes it the top pure-play AI content detector.
• Established academic tools such as Turnitin (turnitin.com) have been adding AI content detection alongside anti-plagiarism features. Turnitin introduced its AI content detection tool in April, and is on track to top 17 million visits in May, up from 15 million a year ago. That’s an 11.5% year-over-year increase. AI content detection is also being baked into learning management systems used by universities and school systems.
• ChatGPT creator OpenAI introduced its own text classifier to help identify content created by its own tool and others, but it’s not as widely used as some of the other commercial products. OpenAI’s tool attracted 861,700 visits in April, based on desktop web traffic.
• Some of the websites offering AI content detection also aim to help copywriters and other content creators use AI in their work – but are still seeing the bulk of their incoming traffic go straight to the page for AI content detection. That’s true of 80% of the traffic to writer.com, 85% for contentatscale.ai, and 61% for copyleaks.com. Those estimates are based on desktop web traffic to the segment of their website concerned with AI content detection.

Top Sites Offering AI Content Detectors

Here are the leading sites offering free (or free trial) AI content detection tools as part of their services, not including Turnitin, an established academic tool that among other things helps verify the originality of homework assignments.

The leading pure-play AI content detector, GPTZero, was created on a shoestring budget by 22-year-old Edward Tian to help professors detect the use of AI in student work. GPTZero has since hired AI PhDs to help scale the business, which recently attracted $3.5 million in funding.

Several companies shown in this comparison are not new but have seen strong growth since adding AI content generation features and tapping into the groundswell of interest in the positive and negative implications of AI text generators. The boom started at the end of November 2022, with the launch of ChatGPT.

AI content detection tools ranked by traffic

Most of the domains ranked by traffic above are for companies that provide other services, in addition to AI content detection, with GPTZero the big exception. To rank their AI content detection tools more accurately, we can look at the traffic segments within those sites related to AI content detection and compare them with GPTZero and originality.ai, another new service born to capitalize on the concern about AI text (although it also offers plagiarism detection).

This shows that Writer (writer.com) is the second most popular tool behind GPTZero among this crop of upstarts. Based on desktop web traffic, the comparison is about 5 million visits for NetZero to about 3 million for Writer in April.

The much more established academic tool Turnitin still attracts about three times as much traffic as GPTZero.

Bot hunting looks like a good business

The academic business worlds are still adapting to the advent of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools and figuring out rules for when using them is right or wrong. This is particularly a big issue in education, but law firms might want to give their attorney’s work similar scrutiny following the case of the lawyer who used ChatGPT to write a legal brief that turned out to be full of made-up citations.

In a recent essay in The Atlantic, The First Year of AI College Ends in Ruin, Ian Bogost uses the example of the student who used ChatGPT not to write his paper but to “debate” him on the points he was making so that he could strengthen his thesis. In some cases, the use of these tools could be perfectly appropriate, while in other cases an AI detection tool might wrongly flag a student’s work as AI generated when it wasn’t – which some studies have found to particularly be a problem when English is not the student’s first language.

Yet there’s no doubt that text generators make evaluating the originality of any written work harder for academics, editors, and hiring managers – all of whom are looking for help.

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Report By: David F. Carr, Senior Insights Manager

Methodology

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