In the case of GPTZero — which goes off “a large, diverse corpus of human-written and AI-generated text, with a focus on English prose” — the AI seeks out “perplexity” as a sign of human touch in writing.

“Perplexity is a function of ‘how surprising is this language based on what I’ve seen?’ ” Margaret Mitchell, of the AI company Hugging Face, told the outlet.

So, when a paper is turned in with much of its language consistent with training data a k a famous documents, manifestos and proper writing, a perplexity score would hit quite low and trip AI sensors.

Burstiness, otherwise known as the consistency of how words and phrases appear in a writing sample, is also used as a security measure.

However, recent in-depth, human-engineered research from the University of Maryland doubled down that these kinds of methods are “not reliable in practical scenarios” and don’t deserve an A for effort.

The technological shortcoming has inspired some professors, including Wharton’s Ethan Mollick, to embrace AI in education rather than shun it.

Mitchel, A. (2023, July 25). AI thinks the Constitution was written by bots — but there’s a bigger issue. New York Post. https://nypost.com/2023/07/25/why-its-a-problem-that-ai-thinks-the-constitution-was-made-by-ai/