ChatGPT and AI writing assistants have exploded in popularity among students, with their ability to generate essays, answers, and more with just a few prompts.
However, these same skills present challenges when it comes to academic integrity and plagiarism detection. Turnitin has responded by updating its suite of tools, claiming to catch AI-written work with up to 98% accuracy.
I believe, Turnitin similarity score is one of the most daunting thing for many students. Anxiety before revealing the final score is too much.
We spent extensive time understanding if Turnitin GPT checker is good enough and if you should care about it.
As a student, should you be concerned? Does getting caught by Turnitin's AI detector mean automatic failure or disciplinary action?
How Does Turnitin ChatGPT Detection Work?
Turnitin uses a deep learning model trained to spot differences between human writing and text generated by AI systems like ChatGPT. This detector gives each sentence a "GPT score" between 0–1, with 0 meaning definitely human-written and 1 meaning definitely AI-written.
It then averages these scores to give an overall prediction of how much of the submitted text is AI-generated.
Some key signals the model looks for:
- Word probability - AI models generate text based on high probability word sequences, while humans are more random in word choice.
- Consistency - ChatGPT output tends to be smoother in tone without abrupt idea shifts.
- Topical drift - Humans tangentially drift between ideas more than AI text.
- Idiosyncrasies - AI writing lacks unique flourishes, irony, and imperfection of human writers.
By spotting these patterns, Turnitin can identify GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and Codex derivatives like ChatGPT with a claimed accuracy of 98%. However, it's not foolproof.
This was the recent Turnitin's AI detection information from one of the scientists. It was published on official channel:
Turnitin AI checker is certainly getting better, however there are many few challenges with any such technology.
There are many discussions on college forums regarding these concerns. Primarily, false proofs are daunting for genuine students.
One student on Reddit mentioned "He wrote everything by himself just to find out the teacher flagged his assignment as AI written."
This is the big challenge: Unless something is clearly visible there is no way to say if the article is created by ChatGPT or any other AI.
What's the Risk of Getting Caught by Turnitin?
While a big success rate seems worryingly high for students using ChatGPT, the risk varies substantially based on your specific use case:
- Submitting an entire AI-generated essay has an extremely high chance of detection.
- Using ChatGPT for outlines, opening paragraphs, or topic ideation only is less detectible.
- Making significant edits, rewriting, or paraphrasing reduces AI flags as the text becomes more "humanized".
For context, Turnitin's model is more tuned to academic writing versus text found online. Education researchers found it has an 8% false negative rate, meaning it misses some level of AI assistance roughly 1 in 10 submissions.
Additionally, false positives inaccurately accusing human-written text do occur occasionally. So an AI-flag should not be seen as definitive proof without further verification.
Note that false positive is a very frequent phenomenon. If you are an instructor it is wise to take a second opinion and cross check the article with other ChatGPT plagiarism detection tools. You see, Turnitin is not the only one.
What Happens if Caught by Turnitin?
Often students ask this question. Getting flagged for AI usage by Turnitin can have serious fallout depending on your institution's academic policies, including:
- Score/grade reduction
- Failure for the assignment or course
- Forced revisions or resubmission
- Meeting with an academic integrity committee
- Temporary suspension
- Loss of scholarships
We have a detailed article on consequence of plagiarism in academia if you are curious to dive deeper into it.
However, context matters. Schools have begun introducing tiered consequences between assignments completed fully by AI versus receiving AI assistance.
Some also require instructors to verify flags, considering if failure stemmed from intention rather than skill. Students have opportunities to clarify or appeal initial judgements as well.
The core advice is to become deeply familiar with your own school's policies around AI writing assistance to understand outcomes and procedures. In the end, it is going to decide the line between plagiarized and unplagiarized content.
Also, using alternate plagiarism checkers like Urkund or Grammarly is a great way to stay safe.
How To Check if Your Essay is Detected
This is an important topic. let's get onto it: Rather than submitting assignments blindly and hoping for the best, there are proactive tactics students can use to self-assess AI detection risk. Turnitin also offers a self checker tool for students. Beyond that, here are some quick ways to avoid getting plagiarised for ChatGPT by Turnitin:
Use Pre-Submission Tools
Services like GPTZero and GPT plagiarism checkers perform an analysis identifying algorithmically generated text. While not foolproof, they provide a quick second opinion to estimate your risk level.
Manually Review
More meticulously, you can manually inspect assignments for common AI tells based on accuracy, coherency, sources usage and writing style including:
- Strange phrasings or misused idiomatic expressions
- Definitions, names, dates, or other facts that seem suspiciously ambiguous or inaccurate
- Overuse of similar sentence structures and transitions
- Fake, broken, or completely missing sources/citations
- Text with stilted changes between sections indicating fused writings
During these reviews, also search for passages in quotation databases, paste sections into search engines, leverage other plagiarism detectors like Quetext brainstorm heavily revised rewrites.
Seek Unbiased Second Opinions
Trusted mentors like educators and tutors intimately understand academic writing norms versus AI tics. Seeking impartial feedback identifies areas needing improvement better than reviewing alone. Tactfully discuss assistance received rather than accusations.
Through applying these preemptive checks before submission, students take wise precautions ensuring their own academic accountability rather than resorting to denial after-the-fact.
Strategies To Avoid ChatGPT Detection
Avoiding detection begins by using ChatGPT ultra-conservatively given its capabilities versus devious manipulation solely avoiding consequences. However several best practices exist to minimize risk:
Use ChatGPT for Early Phase Drafting Only
The greatest risk lies in submitting final drafts completely composed by AI. Instead use ChatGPT for:
- Outlines - Allowing you to organize thoughts before drafting.
- Intros/Openers - Assisting difficult initial writing.
- Idea generation - Helping brainstorm what concepts to cover.
Then take back control transforming these fragments into complete works exhibiting true understanding in your own voice.
Rewrite, Rewrite, Rewrite
Heavily editing and rewriting initial ChatGPT output obscures its origins by:
- Changing sentence structures
- Altering word choices
- Adding unique transitions
- Inserting intentional redundancies
Aim to completely paraphrase passages supplementing with new research introducing granular details demonstrating comprehension.
Use Multiple Complementary Tools
Rather than over relying on a single provider, leverage an ensemble of assistants including:
- PlagiarismCheckerX - AI plagiarism checker tool that offers cost efficient solution
- Sudowrite - Alternate AI generator if passages seem suspicious
- Grammarly - Catching grammar/spelling errors
Passing sections between multiple tools results in more human-seeming imperfection.
Understand Detection Limitations
Being forewarned about common false positives, sensationalist accuracy claims and the perpetual cat-and-mouse game between generators and detectors prevents overreacting.
Make reasoned accountability and improvement your goal rather than assuming the worst or seeking to trick assessments rather than earn trust.
Key Takeaways
We've covered how Turnitin leverages a deep learning model to detect text written by ChatGPT, GPT-3 and other AI systems with a reported accuracy approaching 98%, based on analyzing factors like word probability, consistency, and topical drift. Turnitin ChatGPT detection abilities are good and getting better.
However, reliability varies based on the extent of AI usage and manual secondary checks remain important before drawing conclusions.
Also it creates many false positives that should be checked against other plagiarism checkers if you are a supervisor. There are many highly efficient plagiarism checkers for research papers available.
Using ChatGPT conservatively during initial research and drafting can provide useful assistance to students improving productivity. However, completely composing or copy-pasting final written work solely in ChatGPT to bypass effort presents definite risks, especially on critical assignments. Remember, Plagiarism is an offence regardless of its nature.
As AI text generation continues advancing, academic institutions are enacting more granular policies with tiered consequences considering context and intent. Taking time to understand your school's updated regulations around AI writing assistance is a very wise choice.
Facing a detection notice or flag can be stressful. But rather than looking to skirt rules or systems, embrace resources to demonstrate comprehensive subject understanding through your own writing as part of upholding personal academic principles.
Feel free to ask if you have any specific doubts related to it.