By the time they graduate, employers will be making them use LLMs anyway
Some universities are opting out of using Turnitin-made software designed to detect whether text in essays and assignments submitted by students was written by AI.
Turnitin, for those who don’t know, offers tools to teachers for identifying plagiarism in people’s school work, and in April added the ability to check for machine-written prose. If left enabled, it automatically scans documents and processes the text into chunks, analyzing each sentence and assigning a score of 0 if it seems like it was composed by humans and 1 if it seems like it was automatically generated using AI. An average score is calculated for the file to predict how much text appears to be AI-written.
Various American universities, however, including Vanderbilt, Michigan State, Northwestern, and the University of Texas at Austin have decided to not use this software over fears that it could lead to students being falsely accused of cheating, as noted by Bloomberg.
Turnitin admitted that its AI text detection tool isn’t perfect, but claimed its false positive rate is less than one percent.
Vanderbilt University said even that figure was too high, and would result in mistakenly flagging 750 papers a year, considering it ran 75,000 papers through Turnitin’s system in 2022.
« Additionally, there is a larger question of how Turnitin detects AI writing and if that is even possible.
