Popular AI-detection tool for educators adds paraphrase feature

Turnitin, the software maker that helps educators check the integrity of students’ work, on Monday announced a new feature that helps detect whether AI has been used to paraphrase.

“AI has incredible potential to benefit education, but writers need to be transparent in how they use Generative AI,” Annie Chechitelli, Turnitin’s chief product officer said in a news release. “Applying AI paraphrasing to AI-generated content is likely a sign that the writer is trying to hide their use of AI, which is the opposite of transparency. Turnitin provides the tools and insights to preserve the value of original work.”

The company says the new feature, part of a product called Originality, checks text that has been identified as generated by AI for paraphrasing, in addition to checks for the use of artificial intelligence for standard text generation.

Many universities, such as Cornell University, advocate for the use of generative AI in the classroom as a teaching and learning aid. But it’s suspected that much of generative AI’s use is going undetected — a study last year found that one-third of university students were using ChatGPT for their schoolwork.

Tools like Turnitin offer educators one check against the use of generative AI by students. The company claims that in an analysis of 200 million papers, about 3% of them were at least 80% generated by AI, and 11% contained at least 20% AI-generated text.