On April 4, 2023, Turnitin introduced new AI writing detection capabilities into its similarity report. This new feature presents an indicator showing what Turnitin interprets as the overall percentage of the document that may have been generated by AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This indicator is separate from the originality score and will only be visible to instructors and admins, not students. The score is visible in the right-hand portion of the similarity report. To access the full report, users will need to click on this score.

This is what the score looks like in the Similarity Report:

Turnitin Similarity Report with AI Detection Score highlighted with a red rectangle

This is how the full AI Detection Report looks like:

Turnitin AI Detection Report showing 100% score

KU IT Educational Technology cautions instructors on how they may interpret this new score. Turnitin reports that their tool has only been tested against OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-3.5, not GPT-4, Google’s Bard AI or any other AI text generation tools. Even if Turnitin’s estimates of 98% reliability are accurate, the state of AI-generated text is developing rapidly, and it will always be difficult to maintain accuracy in tools designed to respond. Turnitin also admits that it is possible to get false positives with overly redundant text or types of writing it was not designed to review, such as poetry, bullet points, tables, short exam answers, code or scripts. Considering all of this, KU IT Educational Technology cautions against using the AI writing indicator as the sole basis for action or grading and advises only using this information to start further discussions with students about their writing.

To learn more about how this tool will appear in the Turnitin report, please review the following resources provided by Turnitin:

Please also review KU Center for Teaching Excellence's suggestions for how to use AI detectors with student writing.

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to KU IT Educational Technology at itedtech@ku.edu.