Professors use AI detection tools to tread carefully

From election-related robocalls and celebrity deepfake videos to doctored images, AI-powered hoaxes are on the rise, intensifying the technological arms race to spot these falsehoods with students abusing the power of ChatGPTa.

But many in higher education are choosing to take a step back and wait, worried that new AI-generated tools for detecting plagiarism will do more harm than good.

Twenty-five years ago, you got the message to your students: “We know this isn't for them,'' said Emily Isaacs, director of faculty excellence at Montclair State University. .Could not be located [online]but you knew in your heart it wasn't theirs.

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Montclair announced in November, a year after ChatGPT's launch, that academics should no longer use Turnitin's tool's AI detection capabilities. Other universities, including Vanderbilt University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Northwestern University, followed suit.

The big question driving these decisions is: “Do AI detection tools really work?”

That's a real problem, Isaacs said, and he doesn't want to say he cheated when he didn't. Instead, we have focused on raising awareness and mitigation strategies, she said.

Awareness of the dangers of AI deception and plagiarism is rapidly increasing. This week, Metaparent, which owns Facebook and Instagram, announced that it would begin labeling images generated by AI. This was followed by a fake AI-generated pornographic image of singer Taylor Swift circulating online, triggered by an AI-powered robocall impersonating President Joe Biden in an attempt to suppress votes in the New Hampshire primary. A commotion ensued. The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday banned these AI robocalls.

Meanwhile, discussions about plagiarism and its detection have surged since Claudine Gay, the current and former president of Harvard University, was accused of plagiarizing parts of two previously published papers. Gay subsequently resigned following a Congressional hearing on anti-Semitism in higher education.

While faculty have been worrying for more than a year about the potential for AI tools like ChatGPT to be misused, technology companies like Turnitin are touting the benefits of AI detectors. This tool is typically integrated with other grammar and writing software and scans text like a spell checker or plagiarism prevention program.

Turnitin says its AI detection tools can miss about 15 percent of AI-generated text in a document to avoid false positives.

The company's website says it was happy with this because it doesn't want to highlight human-written text as AI text, noting a false positive rate of 1%.

Discovery tools raise their own questions, and for many institutions, there are no clear answers.

“I don't know if it's going to break down like that, whether it's totally for or totally against,” said Holly Hassell, director of Michigan Technological University's composition program. You imagine it to be a tool that, while potentially beneficial, is flawed and may disadvantage some students.

Effectiveness of AI detectors

Last June, an international team of academics found that more than a dozen AI detection tools were neither accurate nor reliable.

That same month, a team of students at the University of Maryland discovered that the tool could be circumvented entirely by flagging works not created by AI or by paraphrasing AI-generated text. Their study found that these detectors are unreliable in real-world scenarios.

Many companies have raised large sums of money and claim to have detectors that can be used reliably, but the problem is that none of them explain what they are evaluating or how they do it; it is just a snap. shot, said university director Sohail Faizi. AI Lab oversaw the Maryland team.

In November, two professors from the University of Adelaide in Australia conducted an AI detection experiment for Times Higher Education (parent company of Inside Higher Eds).

While some tools, such as Copyleaks, worked better than others, the professors summarized their findings with a caveat: The real lesson is that students should assume they can defeat any AI detection tool, regardless of its sophistication.

Isaacs said the study itself raises concerns about feeding student work into generative AI tools, and it's not clear what was done with it.

Isaacs and Feizi also pointed to other issues, such as the lack of evidence left behind when the tool flags suspected AI writing.

With AI detection, Isaacs said, it's just a score and nothing to click on. The techniques used by the detection system cannot be replicated or analyzed, making it a black box.

Turnitin's AI Detector

Annie Chechitelli, chief product officer at Turnitin, emphasized the importance of teacher-student relationships, rather than relying solely on technology tools.

In a statement to Inside Higher Ed, Checchitelli said detection is just one small piece of the puzzle in how educators can address AI writing in the classroom. The biggest piece of that puzzle is the relationship between students and teachers. Our teaching is that there is no substitute for getting to know your students, their writing styles and backgrounds.

Despite being skeptical of detection tools, Feizi and other researchers fully support the use of AI technology.

A more comprehensive solution, Feige said, is to incorporate AI models into education. It's a bit of a tough job, but it's the right way to think about it. The wrong way is to police it, or worse, rely on unreliable detectors to police it.

The beginning of our approach to AIDetection

The Modern Language Association and the University Conference on Composition and Communication have carefully provided guidance on AI detectors. The two groups formed a joint task force on writing and AI in November 2022 and published their first research paper in July.

Although we have not taken a formal position, the principle is that accountability tools should be used with care and insight, or not at all, said the task force co-chair and Michigan Technologist. said Hassell, a university professor. He added that there are different approaches to the tool among members of the task force, with some members banning the tool altogether.

The group's second working paper, which will delve deeper into AI detection and tool usage, is expected to be completed this spring.

Elizabeth Steer, an English instructor at the University of North Georgia, has written about the effectiveness of AI detectors. She and the rest of her UNG faculty use her AI detector iThenticate from Turnitin. Student work is automatically checked when you submit work to Dropbox.

Some journals also use the iThenticate tool, but the value of the expensive software is debated. Turnitin, powered by iThenticate, offers customized pricing based on your organization's size and needs. Otherwise, it typically costs $100 for each manuscript under 25,000 words.

Steer said AI detectors are just one tool to prevent plagiarism.

She said this is a thorny issue, a complex and thorny issue, so each agency really needs to weigh the pros and cons and make its own decisions.

This problem is further complicated by the incorporation of AI into popular writing tools such as Grammarly, Google Docs, and various spell checkers.

It was like that many times [students saying], No, I wasn't using AI, but then it turned out they were using a holistic paraphrase tool without thinking of it as an AI tool, Steer said. The lines are much more blurred now. I really feel for the students because that didn't happen when we were at the school.

Steer uses these cases as teachable moments to illustrate the varying degrees of plagiarism.

If all the students said I didn't use AI, I said, “Yes, you did, it doesn't help anyone,'' she said. But you can talk to them directly to understand their writing process. Have they used the tool or extension and consider it AI?

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