Turnitin

And thank God I don't have to deal with that because I'll have hung up my pen by then.

It reminds me, my kids are all in their 30s, but back when they were in middle school, there was a technology or platform called Turnitin.

I don't know if you remember this from your school days or if you encountered this so turn it in was a platform that was able to identify work that was not your own so they were on the lookout for plagiarism and i think turn it in still exists and a lot of school districts around the country who are adapting it and embracing it and requiring their students to clear their written work through turn it in before they submitted it to their teachers.

So, you know, this was going on for years with my kids.

A long time.

Like anti-plagiarism software has been the domain of higher ed and academia and the publishing world in that capacity, right? So Turnitin has been a product that's been in use on campuses for quite a long time.

You know, students submit their work.

It gets run through Turnitin software and then Turnitin sort of matches mostly basically based on their repository of articles that they have at student submitted work, but also on the web.

So in the days like student would just copy something from Google, Wikipedia, put it in their paper and Turnitin would do that.

But with ChatGPD came along, other companies like GPT-0 and a few other companies tried to pioneer, and Turnitin actually itself, tried to pioneer a sort of new AI detector that could give you a score about the possibility of whether it was written by AI or a human being.

But what's been the problem with those? They're terrible.

They're terrible.

So, you know, existing systems, like you may

be familiar with Turnitin, for example, are quite expensive, but Turnitin is obsolete because nobody does traditional plagiarism anymore.

Why copy an existing essay that when the evidence is on the internet, if you can just generate one with AI, right? So our solution to the problem of AI misuse is actually a general solution to plagiarism in general, and is actually much more economical.

in terms of dollars, and even in terms of process and complications.

What tools do you actually use if you don't mind telling us?

Turnitin used to sort of be the most accurate according to peer reviewed studies, but it's, I think they tried to do paraphrase detection and now they, they've cast a wider net.

And as a result, they have more false positives, uh, is what we're seeing anecdotally.

So unfortunately I am seeing a lot of probably false, false flags from turn it in.

And I would like to switch to pan Graham, um, because of some third party evaluations of pan Graham, um, showing that it's more accurate.

So sometimes I'll say to students, oh, your work was flagged by Turnitin.

Do you want to meet with me or do you want to run it through Pangram and show me that report? So that's one technique I've used.

I like

Yeah.

The same way OneDrive has Turnitin.

Oh, yeah.

That's right.

Yeah.

Anyway.

Turnitin.com. Yeah.

I don't even think any of the AI detecting functions of that work, though.

ChatGPT reached the public at the end of 2022, and universities suddenly faced a free tool that could write a passable essay in seconds.

Turnitin, the plagiarism checking company already used in classrooms around the world, moved fast.

In the spring of 2023, it added an AI writing detector to the software that students already used to submit their work.

The pitch was simple, and it appealed to overwhelmed instructors.

At launch, the company expressed 98% confidence in its ability to find AI writing.

Adoption was extraordinary.

By May of 2023, Turnitin reported that the detector had processed 38.5 million submissions.

Of those, 9.6% showed more than 20% AI writing.

I have a lot of hard time explaining this to people.

And in the US, there have been prior cases like There is a plagiarism software called Turnitin.

So putting students' essay into Turnitin to understand if it's plagiarized or not is not violation of fair use.

So that's not copyright infringement.

Similarly, putting an essay into an AI detection tool to know if it's written by a human or a machine is not copyright infringement.

We apologize.

It's Turnitin rather than Turintin.

That is not Hannah's fault.

That's mine.