AI Writing

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Is ChatGPT the End of Writing? Turnitin Believes It Could Actually Boost Students' Writing Instruction

• 03/27/23

“Of course I do not want to demonize teachers — there are very good reasons why those best practices are hard to do consistently, reasons it is challenging for teachers to do some of those things that they know to be best practices. This is a place where AI for good can come to play, right? There are ways that AI can cut down on some of the challenges that actually make it hard for educators to adhere to best practice — like how do you handle that insurmountable stack of papers and get it back to students in a timely way? That encourages us to take shortcuts as educators, because that's overwhelming. 

“We know for example, that actionable feedback is one of the most powerful tools to impact student growth, particularly in writing. But it's hard to do, because it takes a lot of effort to write that kind of feedback on each student composition. So teachers need tools that are going to give them back the time that it takes to adhere to those best practices. So I do think this is a moment where we can grow and learn as a field, and get back to some of these pedagogical best practices.”

How School Bans on ChatGPT Will Widen Equity Gaps

West-Smith: “I think [schools banning ChatGPT] opens up real questions around equity, who has access to the tool is a matter of equity. If students can use their personal devices to get around those kinds of bans, then certain students will be privileged in having access to these tools, while other students will not. Certain students have access to these tools instructionally and learn how to harness their power and use them effectively. Those students are being privileged in the world that they're moving into in the future, there are jobs that will literally not be available to the students who have not had the privilege of that equitable access. 

“So when we just slap a flat ‘This is banned’ sticker on it and say, ‘No one can use these tools,’ we have to really ask ourselves, what are we doing when we make a decision like that? Because we are potentially privileging certain people and really holding back other people — and in my heart, I have a real problem with that. 

“I understand the instinct and the fear, and the [knee-jerk reaction] to say ‘We want to shut these down, we don't want anyone using them inappropriately.’ But with time, discussion, and communication, I think most educators will say, ‘We don't want to flat out ban these tools, but we want to put some guardrails around them so that we know how to use them effectively.’ We know how to maintain academic integrity, we know how to encourage original thinking. And we're going to do those things safely — but with an eye toward not privileging certain groups of students and not providing access to everyone.”

Adamson: “Making sure that everyone has access to these tools, making it easy for instructors to understand how the tools are being used to give them guidance on how they can use the tools effectively in their own instruction [is very important]. Could ChatGPT tools be used as an outlining task, or to help students who are struggling with English language to learn how to rephrase their sentences in a more appropriate academic voice? Tthese may be very appropriate uses that are formative and can bring the students who are struggling upwards to be on the same plane as their peers. So I'm excited because we've barely scratched the surface of what we at Turnitin are going to do. ... But I'm always excited about ways that we can bring these tools to the hands of teachers and students.”

A Little About How Turnitin’s Detector Works

Adamson: “So the way our detector works isn't looking at one sentence at a time, it's looking at whole chunks, at several hundred words, at a time. We want to be better about identifying that and saying, you know, maybe there's some distinctive distinguishing characteristic of AI writing that isn't present here. Turnitin as a whole started with originality measurements: Where did your sources come from? How are you using sources in your text. And these days, it's not going to be a literal copy-paste from somewhere on the internet, it's going to be something that's been mediated in some way by technology, whether it's been paraphrased, or has been AI-written.

“Also, we are growing as an AI writing detection feature; this is not our final form. We will make mistakes, and we want to own that upfront: We're not perfect, our detector is going to highlight text that may not be AI written — the instructor is still in the driver's seat, they have to be the one understanding the student in context. Our goal is that our detection features don’t make very many mistakes at all. But if there a category of writing that folks discover that we're missing, that we really need to get better at, I want folks to reach out to us, there will be a link in the detection tool page for educators to say, ‘Hey, this is something that needs improving.’ And that constant improvement is not only important to me as a scientist, but also to the idea of education of being a learner in this space ourselves.”

Learn more about Turnitin’s development of AI writing features and find training and additional resources for educators at the Academic Integrity in the Age of AI Writing on Turnitin.com.