Turnitin’s AI Similarity Report emphasises text that may have been generated by AI tools. Turnitin purports to have crafted this tool to aid educators in upholding academic integrity and ensuring equitable treatment for students. The incorporation of Turnitin’s AI writing indicator into the Similarity Report offers insights into AI-produced content within submitted documents. The AI writing indicator displays an overall percentage denoting potential AI-generated text, drawing on Turnitin’s AI model. Language models like ChatGPT are trained using extensive internet text data, rendering them predictable in producing sequences of words based on high probabilities. Conversely, human writing is more varied and distinctive, leading to reduced word prediction probabilities. Turnitin’s classifiers are constructed to discern these variances and excel in pinpointing the word probability patterns of human authors (refer to Turnitin, 2023).
Currently, the precision of AI detectors remains ambiguous, and false positives are notably common (Dalalah & Dalalah, 2023). This is further corroborated by recent controversies, notably the significant number of unfounded allegations against students at Lancaster University (Jordan, 2023). The deployment of these models is also critiqued as a manifestation of technological solutionism, wherein challenges associated with technology are addressed with further technological solutions, carrying significant environmental repercussions (Stokel-Walker, 2023).
