Limerick student wins young scientist award for artificial intelligence project
The BT Young Scientist & Technologist of the Year Award to Seán O'Sullivan from Colaiste Chiarain Co Limerick for his project 'VerifyMe: A new approach to authorship attribution in the post-ChatGPT era'. Picture: Fennell Photography 2023
Out of 550 projects and more than 1,100 participating students from 219 schools across Ireland, it was Seán O’Sullivan from Croom in Limerick who took home the winning prize at the 60th BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition.
The 17-year-old fifth-year student took home the prize for his project which aims to detect the use of AI in written work, among other things.
His school, Coláiste Chiaráin in Croom, also took home the award for best school in the Republic of Ireland.
Pressure had been building amongst the bright young minds whose projects spanned across all sciences and topics from AI, vapes, climate change and various technologies and software designed and constructed.
Thousands of parents, both proud and anxious, filled the RDS soon before the ceremony began where Education Minister Norma Foley awarded Séan with the top prize.
Séan said the world has been “grappling” to try and accurately detect AI-generated content since ChatGPT was released in November 2022 adding that even its creators, Open AI, tried to develop such a system but discontinued it due to very low accuracy scores.
His project, however, took a different approach and sought to detect AI content by giving past examples of the author’s writing.
The software analyses the work by dividing it into 58 different values from stylometry, the study of authorship style, before then being fed into a Siamese neural network, a method in AI that teaches computers to process data similarly to the human brain.
His system outperformed the seven most popular detection systems and achieved 85% accuracy.
“It can accurately tell you whether it was written by the same author or not by analysing the author’s style.
“Effectively this means when comparing VerifyMe to the seven most popular AI content detection systems in adversarial cases where they're being bypassed, VerifyMe sees accuracy increases of up to 3.1 times that of the best performing AI content detection systems,” he said.
Not only could his software be used to detect AI but it could also be used to see if someone plagiarised, or essentially checks if anyone other than the intended author did the work for them.
Seán believes VerifyMe could be used globally across various sectors impacted by the use of ChatGPT.
The 17-year-old said the project was a year of trial and error noting that it was “1% idea and 99% iteration”.
He said the use of AI in school as well as the fact that it could not believably mimic specific authors piqued his interest and inspired him to develop the system.
Along with the coveted trophy, Séan will receive a cheque worth €7,500 as well as the chance to represent Ireland at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists.
