Turnitin.com introduces AI detector: How is AI transforming the classroom and what is being done about it?
Turnitin.com’s new AI detector for student essays has been praised for its remarkable accuracy in identifying AI-generated content.
As artificial intelligence technology (AI) continues to evolve and proliferate, an increasing number of students are resorting to utilizing such resources to plagiarize essays, complete their homework assignments, and engage in additional forms of academic misconduct.
In a bid to combat this issue, the widely adopted educational platform turnitin.com has developed a cutting-edge software capable of detecting AI-generated essays and paragraphs.
“In my opinion, I think that I get conflicting ideas from the use of AI. While in some cases, it is beneficial to increase the speed of tasks, it leads to an increase of laziness among students,” said Brady MacIsaac (‘25).
Both in the Bay Area and around the country, teachers and professors have seen a dramatic increase in the number of students using AI to help them complete tasks. However, many educators have implemented certain policies or slightly altered course curriculum to avoid the use of resources such as GPT-4 and Google Bard from entering the classroom.
“A lot of my past and current English teachers have used turnitin.com to grade essays, because it detects plagiarism and has other benefits. Now, due to AI, we are completing more assignments by hand,” said Lily Washam (‘24).
Moreover, in the past few days, turnitin.com’s new feature will alert teachers when their students are using AI by checking student’s work against the patterns, readability, and flow of AI-developed language.
“This new feature on turnitin.com will most likely eliminate students’ usage of AI, and I think it will be a wakeup call for some, because they will start having to complete more work,” said Washam.
With the end of the year nearing, a multitude of students have been more relaxed on completing assignments, eager for summer to begin. With AI and ChatGPT starting to get recognized, many students have noted that they will need to focus more on their respective assignments.
“Some students may suffer from writer’s block. I think AI could provide suggestions on what to write and include in their essays,” said MacIsaac.
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