A geography professor shared his method to detect AI-generated plagiarism with Fox News. He developed it after noticing that ChatGPT produced fake citations. Companies that develop software to detect if artificial intelligence or humans authored an essay or other written assignment are having a windfall moment amid ChatGPT's wild success. ChatGPT launched last November and quickly grew to 100 million monthly active users by January, setting a record as the fastest-growing user base ever. The platform has been especially favored by younger generations, including students in middle school through college.

Since its release last November, ChatGPT has shaken the education world. The chatbot and other sophisticated AI tools are reportedly being used everywhere from college essays to high school art projects. This is a problem for schools, educators and students – but a boon for a small but growing cohort of companies in the AI-detection business. Players like Winston AI, Content at Scale and Turnitin are billing for their ability to detect AI-involvement in student work, offering subscription services where teachers can run their students' work through a web dashboard and receive a probability score that grades how "human" or "AI" the text is. At this stage, most clients are teachers acting on their own initiative, although Winston AI says it is beginning talks with school administrators at the district level as the problem grows. And with only one full academic semester since ChatGPT was released, the disruption and headaches are only beginning.