Academic Challenge: 22 million school assignments written by AI

[New Sancai Compilation First Edition] According to Wired, data released by Turnitin, an American plagiarism detection company, stated that at least 22 million assignments submitted by students in 2023 may have been written partly or entirely using generative AI.

Following the release of ChatGPT by OpenAI in late 2022, millions of students have used similar chatbots to brainstorm ideas, inspire assignments, and in some cases even write entire school assignments. Schools have been working to control students and use plagiarism detection software to combat rampant use.

Turnitin's technology has scanned more than 200 million assignments, the majority of which were written by high school and college students. Of the documents reviewed, the software found that 11% of the assignments had 20% of the content potentially written by AI, while 3% of the papers were found to contain 80% or more of the content written by AI.

Turnitin says its writing detection technology is "highly reliable, capable of proficiently distinguishing between artificial intelligence and human-written text, and is designed specifically for student writing."

Turnitin chief product officer Annie Chechitelli told College Business in February that it will ultimately come down to student transparency and educator effectiveness to mitigate the impact of artificial intelligence in the classroom. Teachers may be forced to think about more challenging assignments, she noted.

"The interesting things we're going to see soon are the unknowns," she said. “Will AI start copying [itself]? When does it start to repeat itself? What does it mean when there is less and less human writing on the web? I think it’s still a question of understanding how AI-generated writing becomes what people do and How do we do it."

Cecchitelli's comments seem prescient, as artificial intelligence may soon be used to evaluate its own work. Prior to the release of the Turnitin report, it was reported that Texas in the United States planned to use artificial intelligence chatbots to grade students' written exams by implementing an "automatic scoring engine." The state claims it will save $15 million to $20 million annually in human scoring costs by using the technology.

While many educators are looking for solutions to the ubiquity of artificial intelligence in the classroom, others worry that using plagiarism detectors like Turnitin could lead to false accusations. Turnitin says its detector has a false positive rate of less than 1% when analyzing complete files.

(Compiled by: Wang Jimin)

(Editor: Jiang Qiming)

(Source of the article: Compiled and published by New Sancai)