04/09/2024

Students are Likely Writing Millions of Papers with AI

One detection tool found millions of papers rife with AI-generated content

In the past year, students have submitted more than 22 million papers that may have used generative AI, new data released by plagiarism detection company Turnitin shows.

A year ago, Turnitin rolled out an AI writing detection tool that was trained on its trove of papers written by students as well as other AI-generated texts. Since then, more than 200 million papers have been reviewed by the detector, predominantly written by high school and college students. Turnitin found that 11 percent may contain AI-written language in 20 percent of its content, with 3 percent of the total papers reviewed getting flagged for having 80 percent or more AI writing. (Turnitin is owned by Advance, which also owns Condé Nast, publisher of WIRED.) Turnitin says its detector has a false positive rate of less than 1 percent when analyzing full documents.

ChatGPT’s launch was met with knee-jerk fears that the English class essay would die. The chatbot can synthesize information and distill it near-instantly—but that doesn’t mean it always gets it right. Generative AI has been known to hallucinate, creating its own facts and citing academic references that do not actually exist. Generative AI chatbots have also been caught spitting out biased text on gender and race. Despite those flaws, students have used chatbots for research, organizing ideas and as a ghostwriter. Traces of chatbots have even been found in peer-reviewed, published academic writing.

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.