Not surprised about this at all. AI-generated copy has been flagged in millions of high school and college papers examined.

According to Newser via Wired (AI-Generated Copy Flagged in Millions of Student Papers, written by Gina Carey and available here), Turnitin, a service that checks papers for plagiarism, says its detection tool found millions of papers that may have a significant amount of AI-generated content.

Turnitin examined 200 million papers using a tool that was trained on student-written work from high schoolers and college students, along with AI-generated text. It found that in 11% of those papers (22 million), 20% of the content was written by AI. In 3% of the papers, it made up 80% of content.

Learners aren’t the only ones using AI to catch a break in the classroom. According to CNN, a growing number of teachers are using AI to grade essays on platforms such as ChatGPT, Writable, Grammarly, and EssayGrader. One analysis found that 22% of teachers used AI in some fashion, up from 9% last year. This means that in some cases, school work amounts to computers grading essays … that were written by computers. Of course.

I covered a related story in the Kitchen Sink week before last shared by Donna Medrek where the Texas Education Agency (TEA) is replacing thousands of temporary human scorers with an “automated scoring engine” that uses natural language processing to grade open-ended questions on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) exams.

Schools and universities looking to cut down on AI-generated work have opted to purchase tools like Turnitin, though the tech isn’t perfect. For one thing, “generated text is still original text,” making it trickier to spot than flat-out plagiarized text, notes Wired. And the ones being caught the most are those still learning the English language, raising concerns about bias.

Something tells me we’re heading toward development an entire industry with models on one side being used for AI-generated copy trying to stay ahead of AI detectors on the other side which are trying to spot it. With less and less people learning good writing skills. Sigh.

So, what do you think? Are you surprised that AI-generated copy has been flagged in millions of student papers? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using Bing Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “robot sitting at a desk in front of a computer monitor reading a document and looking for errors”.

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