The introduction of ChatGPT, the eerily intelligent and verbose chatbot by OpenAI, has sparked fears that it will cause cheating in schools and overall laziness in the writing profession due to the software's ability to generate perfectly constructed essays in seconds.
But it's actually quite easy to detect if a piece of writing was generated by AI, according to Writer CEO May Habib. Her San Francisco startup has developed a free tool to prove it.
Writer, which offers AI tools for enterprises to help them create written content more efficiently, developed the tool in October, a month before ChatGPT was made available to the public. But the massive public attention toward the AI chatbot has driven people to try out Writer's tool. Habib says the tool has around 300,000 weekly active users, which includes existing enterprise customers.
"Especially in the enterprise space, I think the interest in generative AI has only served to massively accelerate adoption," she said. "So we felt like we got $50 billion of free advertising over Christmas."
Habib can't say how accurate the tool is currently, but says it works far better on long-form text rather than a few sentences.
That's because there are a few telltale signs to distinguish AI writing from work done by humans.
"It is a little bit of a you-know-it-when-you-see-it, but for folks who are good readers and writers to begin with, seeing content that is long on generalities and short on specifics is a definite tell," Habib said. "So imagine going two or three paragraphs without an anecdote or a quote or a specific statistic."
Another point to note is the AI's perfection. It does not make grammatical or spelling errors.
But probably the most easily identifiable tell, according to Habib, is that the AI does not use passive voice, only the active.
"Humans will default to the passive voice when they are trying to soften the blow to a reader to feel more empathetic, more sympathetic, more self deprecating," she said. "And so AI does not do that — it doesn't give a s--t, it just wants to be clear."
Writer has raised $26 million to date, according to Pitchbook.
