(ConservativeJournal.org) – In 2023, a company called Turnitin that specializes in plagiarism detection released data showing over 22 million submitted student papers might have been completely written by AI programs.
Since the introduction of ChatGPT by OpenAI in 2022, students have increasingly relied on similar chatbots to generate ideas, write entire essays, and sometimes even write whole academic papers, passing them off as their own. In response, educational institutions have turned to plagiarism-detection software to address this widespread phenomenon.
Turnitin’s technology has gone over the content of over 200 million papers. These were submitted primarily by high school and college students. The collected data revealed that approximately 11% of these papers might contain content generated by artificial intelligence. The flagged papers were further analyzed and revealed to contain over 20% of fully AI generated content, according to the investigations. Shockingly, 3% of all submitted essays and papers scored over 80% or more.
According to Annie Chechitelli, Turnitin’s chief product officer, addressing the influence of AI in classrooms is an important subject. It will require transparency from students and adaptability from educators. She anticipates that educators may need to assign more challenging tasks than essays, so that AI does not do all the work for them.
Chechitelli also raised some questions about the impact AI generated writing will have in the future. She speculates if AI will eventually end up plagiarizing itself and what implications that might hold for the integrity of online content.
Because this technology is constantly being improved, it is unavoidable that AI’s role in education will get even bigger. Texas recently announced plans to utilize AI chatbots for grading written exams, aiming to save millions of dollars annually in labor costs.
While Turnitin claims to barely have any false positives, there are still valid concerns voiced by students and educators about the reliability of plagiarism detectors and the potential for false accusations.
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