One of the weirder things about the emergence of ChatGPT is that a major concern was that college students would use it to “cheat” on essays.

I mean, it’s certainly a thing college students will do.

But in the sweep of history, after AI has disrupted journalism and law and medicine and every other profession, it won’t make anyone’s top 10 list.

It is, however, a testimony to the power of the media to direct a lot of attention.

It’s also an awesome example of how fast the tech world can move.

Shortly after the concern in academia emerged, a 22-year-old Princeton University student built a model aimed at detecting text that was generated by AI.

Edward Tian spent the New Year’s holiday building the app.

He announced it to his 6,724 followers on Twitter on Jan. 2. It went viral and crashed his site.

In the week or so since, he’s been interviewed by NPR and Business Insider and a slew of other publications.

Tian told NPR that his program, GPTZero, can “quickly and efficiently” decipher whether a person or AI program authored an essay.

He’s also transformed that initial janky site, adding some lovely imagery on a landing page with the tagline: Humans Deserve to Know the Truth.

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As a friend commented to me, the velocity of tech and business is sometimes unbelievable.