[Athen] AI-focused plagiarism checkers and assistive technologies

[Romack, Justin]

Howdy y'all!

I'm a strong advocate for AI solutions like ChatGPT and other generative text tools that, when used ethically and responsibly, have the chance to spark new and exciting ways to create and communicate...

But I've had two students in the past 24 hours (with 0 other concerns this entire semester) who have been flagged for plagiarism by TurnITIn (cited as using ChatGPT or AI technologies).

Both use assistive technologies (one is a speech-to-text user and the other uses a text prediction tool). They both also use Grammarly (one says they only made use of Grammarly's features to change a word here or there, while the other mentions Grammarly helped them re-write entire sentences at a time). I could see the latter example with Grammarly causing issues, unless the first example was being conservative with how they truly used the tool.

Does anyone know much about the underlying technology of word prediction tools or Grammarly? I know there's some machine learning baked into a lot of the things we use daily... but think LLMs like ChatGPT are notably different than tools that are making recommendations based on content you've created yourself.

Related: Has anyone heard about recent updates to TurnItIn that are flagging AI-generated content more aggressively than in the past? I knew this was coming, but hadn't heard anything about a rollout.

Thanks in advance for my clunky post and questions!

Be well,
J

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Justin Romack  | Assistant Director
Disability Resources | Texas A&M University
1224 TAMU | College Station, TX 77843-1224

ph: 979.845.1637 | justinr at disability.tamu.edu<mailto:justinr at disability.tamu.edu> | disability.tamu.edu
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DIVISION OF STUDENT AFFAIRS | One Division. One Mission.

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