Students handing in AI-written assignments to be caught, uni warns

Claims that computer-generated essays cannot be detected by university markers are about to be put to the test after a sophisticated upgrade to an assignment-checking program.

A major Australian university has warned cheating students it now has software that will detect if they’ve used artificial intelligence AI technology in assignments without permission.

The education world has been shaken by an explosion in popularity of powerful AI tools like ChatGPT - which can generate full computer-written essays from scratch - with fears the assignments cannot be picked up by existing plagiarism checks.

But the University of NSW has just sent a notice to its students that its existing cheating software program Turnitin now includes a sophisticated new AI detection tool which teachers will immediately start using.

“As this is a new tool, we recognise that there may be instances where the use of AI may be incorrectly identified,” acting deputy vice chancellor student experience Professor Louise Lutze-Mann told students.

“This tool will be used as one of a number of pieces of information that may indicate the unauthorised use of AI in assignments.

CM Postgraduate Studies feature - generic students at a library

“The unauthorised or unacknowledged use of AI in assessments is a form of cheating and is considered to be student misconduct at UNSW.”

Some teachers may allow an “acceptable use of AI”, the university warns, but students must footnote such instances.

The UNSW software claims to be able to detect if students submit content written by an AI program like ChatGPT. Picture: Leon Neal

That contrasts with Sydney University, which on Wednesday said it would not switch on the AI detection software yet without adequate testing or time to prepare staff.

“We aren’t turning on Turnitin’s new AI detection feature immediately – we aim to avoid making major changes to our systems mid-semester, and without adequate testing or visibility, or time to prepare staff,” a spokeswoman said.

“We’re actively reviewing the feature’s capability to determine if it might provide our markers with extra assistance when they’re assessing the originality of work submitted by our students, alongside our current range of detection methods.”

Sydney University has already announced plans to include more “pen and paper assessments”, increased in-person supervision for online tests and more closely supervised checks of assignment drafts to thwart cheaters.

Sydney University is adopting a wait and see approach to review the new AI cheating capabilities of Turnitin.

Last week the US based company Turnitin announced the launch of its new AI detection capability in Australia, claiming it had a 98 per cent confidence in identifying the use of AI writing tools including ChatGPT.

The company says its AI detector “provides an evaluative measure of how many sentences in a written submission may have been generated by artificial intelligence”.

It said it began working on detection capabilities for GPT3 - the underlying technology on which many AI writing applications are based - almost two years before ChatGPT came out.

“To maintain a less than one per cent false positive rate, we only flag something when we are 98 per cent sure it is written by AI based on data that was collected and verified in our controlled lab environment,” chief product officer Annie Chechitelli said.