By Promise Eze
Turnitin has successfully developed an AI writing detector that, in its lab, identifies 97 percent of ChatGPT and GPT3 authored writing, with a very low less than 1/100 false positive rate.
The company plans to add this functionality to its core writing integrity products as early as April 2023. The new functionality will operate within the existing Turnitin workflow so that educators will be able to analyze content and use feedback tools in the same user experience they have today.
ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology that allows you to have human-like conversations and much more with a chatbot. The language model can answer questions, and assist you with tasks such as composing emails, essays, and code. Usage is currently open to public free of charge because ChatGPT is in its research and feedback-collection phase. As of Feb. 1, there is also a paid subscription version called ChatGPT Plus.
Turnitin also published an AI writing resource page to support educators with teaching resources and to report its progress in developing AI writing detection features.
“Based on how our detection technology is performing in our lab and with a significant number of test samples, we are confident that Turnitin’s AI writing detection capabilities will give educators information to help them decide how to best handle work that may have been influenced by AI writing tools,” said Annie Chechitelli, Chief Product Officer of Turnitin. “Equally important as our confidence in the technology is making the information usable and helpful and in a format that educators can use.”
She added, “We are being very deliberate in releasing a detector that is highly accurate and trained on the largest dataset of academic writing. It is essential that our detector and any others limit false positives that may impact student engagement or motivation.”
“We are very happy to see productive conversations taking place across the education community about academic integrity and tools to ensure the authenticity of authorship,” said Eric Wang, VP of AI for Turnitin. “Teachers should use Turnitin’s detector to have fulsome conversations with students about this technology. We will continue to develop and refine Turnitin’s detector and are confident that as AI writing evolves, our technology will keep pace with new developments and capabilities.”
Wang added, “We have developed state-of-the-art AI writing detection systems using recent advances in deep learning transformer architecture – the same technology that powers GPT-3 and other large language models (LLMs).
