With Seed Funding Secured, AI Detection Tool GPTZero Launches New Browser Plugin

In December 2022, Edward Tian built a prototype for GPTZero, his ChatGPT-detection tool, out of his dorm room in Princeton University. As the world became increasingly enamored with ChatGPT, Tian had begun to worry that it might soon become difficult to spot AI-generated content masquerading as human-authored articles and essays. The 22-year-old spent his winter break building GPTZero to mitigate this. Then, he spent his spring break securing seed funding for it.

“It’s like opening up a Pandora’s box,” Tian said of ChatGPT in a January interview with Forbes. “It was suddenly thrust upon the world and there’s lots of potential for misuse.”

GPTZero, which has amassed 1.2 million users in the past five months, announced Monday that it has raised $3.5 million in a seed round from early-stage venture firms Uncork Capital and Neo as well as Altman Capital and Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI. Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters and Mark Thompson, former CEO of the New York Times, also participated in the round.

“I think it was important for people to bet on independent third parties to build the safeguards for their technologies,” Tian said last week, adding that there is a growing concern that proliferating large language models are now “polluting the internet.”

GPTZero scans text using its own large language model, which is an “ensemble” of other open-sourced AI models and is trained on both human and AI-generated text, including news articles and questions and answers. By learning from existing generative AI models, the tool calculates and predicts the probability of words in an AI-generated sentence. GPTZero also analyzes patterns in writing using syntax and sentence length to identify machine-generated text. It does a good job of that, though Tian concedes there is always room for improvement. Since chatbot outputs are dependent on the data and prompts given to them, the tool might occasionally flag human content as AI-written and vice-versa. That’s why GPTZero uses both machine learning and human labor to recreate content from different AI programs, ensuring it will evolve to spot AI-generated text with increasing accuracy.

GPTZero can detect text from a variety of AI models, among them Google’s LaMDa (also known as Bard), Facebook’s LLaMa, and OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4. After its launch, GPTZero partnered with educational entities like Canvas and K16 Solutions to gather training data for its AI detection tool; educators found it useful in detecting essays in which students used ChatGPT.

But there are plenty of applications beyond that. The startup plans to market its services to enterprise customers in publishing, social media and trust and safety. Tian says he also sees the government as a potential customer, which could use the AI detection tool to craft policies. The company already has 3,000 paid subscribers for its $9.99 per month plan.

The startup will soon debut a browser plugin called Origin to assess the accuracy and origin of facts in a given piece of published text. With Origin, the startup hopes to support media literacy in the age of artificial intelligence by fact checking AI-generated content as well as verifying citations for AI-generated content. “This is about more than catching students misusing the tools — it’s not even about detecting the AI,” Tian explained. “It’s about preserving what’s human.”