ROUND ROCK, Texas (KXAN) — Like it or not, artificial intelligence has become more integrated into our society in recent years, including in the classroom.

The New York Times reported last month that it received mixed responses to a prompt asking students their thoughts on using AI in the classroom. The article stated that many respondents said it depends on how AI is used, but some worry that the technology could become a crutch and eventually stunt adolescents’ ability to think for themselves.

While reaction to the use of AI varies by person and circumstance, two Central Texas high school students are developing an app that detects if generative AI was used to complete handwritten assignments.

Arush Satasia and Akshat Dev, both juniors at Round Rock High School, created Argus-AI to “help educators maintain academic integrity in a practical and accessible way,” Satasia said via email.

“As a local student passionate about ethical tech and education, I built this app to support teachers navigating these new digital challenges,” Satasia added.

Dev said the inspiration came from an essay he wrote for his AP Seminar class about AI algorithms and biases behind them.

“I stumbled upon the statistic of 56% of students used AI to either cheat on their assignments or their exams,” Dev explained. “There have been other tools on the market to kind of solve this, but none of them actually address handwritten assignments specifically,” he said, explaining that typically, plain text would have to be copied from an online assignment and then pasted into an AI detector to work.

The difference with Argus-AI is that it uses an OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, engine to take the characters of handwritten text from an image and determine the probability that AI was used to write that text.

The app allows a user to upload a photo, which it will then process and calculate a probability score of AI involvement.

“We noticed, like, a gap in that, especially on handwritten assignments,” Satasia said. “And given how common it is that teachers give out handwritten assignments, and the ease that students have to, just directly go into Chat GPT and give back, like, all the information that needs, and teachers didn’t have a way to, like directly address this problem, so we decided to make an Argus that would allow like teachers, or anyone really, to just upload raw images of handwriting and get the likelihood of AI back, just like any other tool.”

The app is still somewhat in development, but a rudimentary version is available on the Apple App Store already.

Satasia said they’re working on expanding access to schools and offering free subscriptions to educators while they work on getting it off the ground and ready for a full launch.

Dev said the biggest challenges in the development process are the authentication side of the app — making sure it can identify that teachers using the app are who they say they are — and the financial aspect, since they’re using paid services and providing a service that generally isn’t free.

“We’re trying to be responsible about pricing for teachers, right? So we want to keep this app free for teachers, and we want to also make it free for educators, maybe even worldwide, right? So covering the cost is definitely one of the obstacles.”

Dev said as far as what’s next for their product roadmap, they’re prioritizing authentication, but they’re also looking to make a larger log to track more scans. They also want the app to be able to show other metrics like highlighting the specific sentences that were the most likely generated by AI.