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“Every kid that graduates today will soon be working on a team where not every team member is human,” says Richard Culatta, CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education.
Over the past few months, I have reviewed whitepapers from potential candidates for positions in my non-profit, The Student Success Project. They were pretty good, though none were particularly breathtaking or absorbing. However, I was amazed by something eerily predictive.
Two documents had identical statements on “the future of youth mental health.” It reeked of AI, so I went robot hunting.
APPROPRIATION
New data released by plagiarism detection company Turnitin shows that students submitted more than 22 million papers that may have used generative AI in the past year.
A year ago, Turnitin rolled out an AI writing detection tool trained on its trove of student papers and other AI-generated texts. Since then, the detector has reviewed over 200 million papers, 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 papers reviewed being flagged for having 80 percent or more AI writing. 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 and distill information near-instantly, but it sometimes needs to get it right. Generative AI has been known to hallucinate, creating facts and citing academic references that don’t exist.
PREJUDICED
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.
Teachers want to hold students accountable for using generative AI without permission or disclosure. However, a reliable way to prove that AI was used in a given assignment is required.
Instructors have sometimes tried to find their own solutions to detecting AI in writing, using messy, untested methods to enforce rules and distressing students. Further complicating the issue, some teachers even use generative AI in their grading processes.
Detecting the use of gen AI is tricky. It’s not as easy as flagging plagiarism because the generated text is still original. Plus, there’s nuance to how students use gen AI; some may ask chatbots to write their papers in large chunks or whole, while others may use the tools as aids or brainstorming partners.
ENTICED
Students are also tempted by only ChatGPT and similar large language models. So-called word spinners are another type of AI software that rewrites text, which may make it less noticeable to a teacher that work was plagiarized or generated by AI. Turnitin’s AI detector has also been updated to detect word spinners, says Annie Chechitelli, the company’s chief product officer.
It can also flag work rewritten by services like spell checker Grammarly, which now has its generative AI tool. As familiar software increasingly adds generative AI components, what students can and can’t use becomes more muddled.
MISINTERPRETATION
Detection tools themselves have a risk of bias. English language learners may be more likely to set them off; a 2023 study found a 61.3 percent false positive rate when evaluating Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) exams with seven different AI detectors.
The study did not examine Turnitin’s version. The company says it has trained its detector on writing from English language learners and native English speakers. A study published in October found that Turnitin was among the most accurate of 16 AI language detectors in a test that had the tool examine undergraduate papers and AI-generated papers.
Schools that use Turnitin had access to the AI detection software for a free pilot period, which ended at the start of this year. Chechitelli says most of the service’s clients have opted to purchase the AI detection.
SUSPENSION
However, the risks of false positives and bias against English learners have led some universities to ditch the tools for now. Montclair State University in New Jersey announced in November that it would pause Turnitin’s AI detector use. Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University did the same last summer.
Chechitelli says the Turnitin tool shouldn’t be the only consideration in passing or failing a student. Instead, it’s a chance for teachers to start conversations with students that touch on all of the nuances of using generative AI. “People don’t know where that line should be,” she says.
Since Chechitelli seems to have all the correct answers, she could help me receive a few thought-provoking, stimulating, provocative, and captivating original responses to my quest for the candidate’s perspective on “redefining student success,” not a robot’s.
This column is by Ritchie Lucas, Founder/CEO of the non-profit The Student Success Project. He can be reached by email at ritchie@studentsuccessproject.org and on Facebook as The Student Success Project.
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