Universities want a temporary pause in the implementation of the system.
A company has created a plagiarism detection tool that it says can find out if essays were written using artificial intelligence tools like Chat GPT. US-based Turnitin claimed its tool can identify the use of AI software with “98 percent certainty”. The Telegraph reported. The software analyzes a piece of writing to assess how many sentences are sentences that may have been generated by AI, the outlet went on to say. However, it has sparked debate among universities whether the tool should be used to detect cheating.
“Turnitin’s technology has high accuracy and low false positive rates in detecting AI-generated text in student writing,” said Annie Chechitelli, the company’s chief product officer. The Telegraph.
“To maintain a false positive rate of less than one percent, we only flag something when we are 98 percent sure it was AI-written from data collected and verified in our controlled lab environment,” she added.
To help college educators, Turitin has also posted some AI writing resources on its website to help institutions understand how to handle this new technology.
Financial Times (FT) said Turnitin’s tool is used by more than 10,000 educational institutions worldwide. But its launch has proved controversial.
Cambridge and other leading UK universities have said they will opt out of the new service, FT reported citing people familiar with the decision.
They expressed concern that a tool like this could falsely accuse students of cheating and humiliate them. Another concern was handing over student data to a private company.
A university body in the UK now plans to work with Turnitin to have an option to temporarily opt out of the position, the outlet went on to say.
