The Turnitin company said its tool is used by more than 10,000 educational institutions.
US company develops tool to detect AI text with “98% confidence”, universities express skepticism
One company has created a plagiarism detection tool that it says can detect whether essays have been written using artificial intelligence tools like Chat GPT. The Telegraph reported that US-based Turnitin claims its tool can identify the use of AI software with “98 percent confidence”. The outlet further stated that the software analyzes the written piece to assess how many sentences would have been created by the AI. However, it has sparked a debate among universities about whether to use the tool to detect cheating.
“Turnitin’s technology has high accuracy and low false positive rates when detecting AI-generated text in student writing,” the company’s chief product officer Anne Cecchitelli was quoted as saying by The Telegraph.
“To maintain a false positive rate of less than one percent, we only flag something when we are 98% sure it was written by AI based on data collected and verified in our controlled lab environment,” she added.
To help university educators, Turin has also released some AI writing resources on its website to help institutions understand how to deal with this new technology.
The Financial Times (FT) stated that Turnitin’s tool is used by more than 10,000 educational institutions worldwide. But the launch has proved controversial.
Cambridge and other leading UK universities have said they will opt out of the new service, the FT reported, citing people familiar with the decision.
They expressed concern that such a tool could falsely accuse students of cheating and humiliate them. Handing over student data to a private company was another concern.
The Association of Universities in the UK now plans to work with Turnitin to have an option to temporarily opt out of the feature, the outlet added.
