A BBC investigation has uncovered claims that essay cheating remains widespread at UK universities despite the introduction of a law designed to stop it. Since April 2022, it has been illegal to provide essays for students in post-16 education in England. But so far there have been no prosecutions. The BBC has spoken to a former lecturer who describes essay cheating as an open secret and to a businessman who claims to have made millions from selling model answer essays to university students. Universities UK, which represents 141 institutions, said there were severe penalties for students caught submitting work that was not their own.

As the use of AI tools by students has become more prevalent, instructors have started using AI detection tools like GPTZero and QuillBot to detect AI written text. However, the reliability of these detectors remains uncertain. In our study, we focused mostly on the success rate of GPTZero, the most-used AI detector, in identifying AI-generated texts based on different lengths of randomly submitted essays: short (40-100 word count), medium (100-350 word count), and long (350-800 word count). We gathered a data set consisting of twenty-eight AI-generated papers and fifty human-written papers. With this randomized essay data, papers were individually plugged into GPTZero and measured for percentage of AI generation and confidence. A vast majority of the AI-generated papers were detected accurately (ranging from 91-100% AI believed generation), while the human generated essays fluctuated; there were a handful of false positives. These findings suggest that although GPTZero is effective at detecting purely AI-generated content, its reliability in distinguishing human-authored texts is limited. Educators should therefore exercise caution when relying solely on AI detection tools.

The email arrived out of the blue: it was the university code of conduct team. Albert, a 19-year-old undergraduate English student, scanned the content, stunned. He had been accused of using artificial intelligence to complete a piece of assessed work. If he did not attend a hearing to address the claims made by his professor, or respond to the email, he would receive an automatic fail on the module. The problem was, he hadn't cheated. The Guardian's journalism is independent.

For my columns during the back-to-school season, I thought it would be useful to go over the state of public education in America. This series will be similar to the one I wrote on parenting a few months back in that it will be wide-ranging in subject, so please bear with me. This past spring, Turnitin, a company that makes anti-cheating tools to detect the use of A.I. in student papers, released its findings based on more than two hundred million samples reviewed by its software. Three per cent of papers had been more or less entirely written by A.I. and roughly ten per cent exhibited some traces of A.I. It's never a great idea to rely on data that a for-profit company releases about its own product, but these numbers do not suggest some epidemic of cheating. Other research has shown that there hasn't been a significant increase in student plagiarism since the unveiling and mass popularization of large language models such as ChatGPT. Students seem to cheat a lot, generally--up to seventy per cent of students reported at least one instance of cheating in the past month--but they cheated at the same rates before the advent of A.I. What has increased is the number of teachers and adults who seem convinced that all the kids are cheating.

Nearly two years ago, ChatGPT's AI writing powers set off a firestorm in classrooms. How would teachers be able to determine which assignments were actually authored by the student? A host of AI-powered services answered the call. Today, there are even more services promising to catch AI cheaters. "My hand cramped up so much," my eldest son complained about his AP World History course he took last year, and the requirement to handwrite all papers and tests because of AI concerns.

Students have submitted more than 22 million papers that may have used generative AI in the past year, new data released by plagiarism detection company Turnitin shows. A year ago, Turnitin rolled out an AI writing detection tool that was trained on its trove of papers written by students as well as other AI-generated texts. Since then, more than 200 million papers have been reviewed by the detector, predominantly written by high school and college students. Turnitin found that 11 percent may contain AI-written language in 20 percent of its content, with 3 percent of the total papers reviewed getting flagged for having 80 percent or more AI writing. Turnitin says its detector has a false positive rate of less than 1 percent when analyzing full documents.

Last winter, the unveiling of OpenAI's alarmingly sophisticated chatbot sent educators into a tailspin. Generative AI, it was feared, would enable rampant cheating and plagiarism, and even make high school English obsolete. Universities debated updating plagiarism policies. Some school districts outright banned ChatGPT from their networks. Now, a new school year presents new challenges--and, for some, new opportunities.

Recent advances in generative pre-trained transformer large language models have emphasised the potential risks of unfair use of artificial intelligence (AI) generated content in an academic environment and intensified efforts in searching for solutions to detect such content. The paper examines the general functionality of detection tools for artificial intelligence generated text and evaluates them based on accuracy and error type analysis. Specifically, the study seeks to answer research questions about whether existing detection tools can reliably differentiate between human-written text and ChatGPT-generated text, and whether machine translation and content obfuscation techniques affect the detection of AI-generated text. The research covers 12 publicly available tools and two commercial systems (Turnitin and PlagiarismCheck) that are widely used in the academic setting. The researchers conclude that the available detection tools are neither accurate nor reliable and have a main bias towards classifying the output as human-written rather than detecting AI-generated text. Furthermore, content obfuscation techniques significantly worsen the performance of tools. The study makes several significant contributions. First, it summarises up-to-date similar scientific and non-scientific efforts in the field. Second, it presents the result of one of the most comprehensive tests conducted so far, based on a rigorous research methodology, an original document set, and a broad coverage of tools. Third, it discusses the implications and drawbacks of using detection tools for AI-generated text in academic settings.

A geography professor shared his method to detect AI-generated plagiarism with Fox News. He developed it after noticing that ChatGPT produced fake citations. Companies that develop software to detect if artificial intelligence or humans authored an essay or other written assignment are having a windfall moment amid ChatGPT's wild success. ChatGPT launched last November and quickly grew to 100 million monthly active users by January, setting a record as the fastest-growing user base ever. The platform has been especially favored by younger generations, including students in middle school through college.

Since its release last November, ChatGPT has shaken the education world. The chatbot and other sophisticated AI tools are reportedly being used everywhere from college essays to high school art projects. This is a problem for schools, educators and students – but a boon for a small but growing cohort of companies in the AI-detection business. Players like Winston AI, Content at Scale and Turnitin are billing for their ability to detect AI-involvement in student work, offering subscription services where teachers can run their students' work through a web dashboard and receive a probability score that grades how "human" or "AI" the text is. At this stage, most clients are teachers acting on their own initiative, although Winston AI says it is beginning talks with school administrators at the district level as the problem grows. And with only one full academic semester since ChatGPT was released, the disruption and headaches are only beginning.