Questions Regarding Turnitin’s AI Detection Tool
Hi,
I have some questions about the AI detection feature in Turnitin.
In several reports for my students, I noticed that the system identifies a high percentage of AI-generated content. However, when I check with the students, they confirm that they did not use any AI tools to write those sections.
In some cases, Turnitin even flags properly cited content taken from websites as AI-generated, despite students having correctly referenced their sources.
Therefore, I would like to understand the reason behind this issue and how best to respond to students in such cases.
Also, what are the most effective strategies to help students avoid using AI tools in their writing tasks?
3 replies
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a student but another teacher reading this
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Also having trouble with this!
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Thank you for sharing your experience with the community,
from our Teaching & Learning Innovations Team, posted about this on TEN and created an insightful resource called "Guide for approaching AI-generated text".
To give you a bit more context on how Turnitin's AI Writing Detection works: Sometimes false positives can occur in text with little structural variation, repeated phrases, or paraphrased content without new ideas. It’s best to review results in context and consider your knowledge of the student’s work. Turnitin’s AI detection provides data to help educators start formative discussions with students, but the final decision on academic integrity always rests with the instructor.For a deeper understanding of our AI detection, you can explore these Help Center resources:
- Turnitin's AI writing detection capabilities FAQs
- Understanding the false positive rate for sentences of our AI writing detection capability
If you find AI-written documents that we've missed, or notice authentic student work flagged as AI-generated, please let us know. Your feedback helps us continue improving detection accuracy. You can share feedback directly through the AI Writing Report by clicking the Turnitin logo and selecting Give feedback. Your feedback helps us continue improving detection accuracy.
- Kat, Turnitin Team