Colleges spend Millions to catch plagiarism and AI. Is Turnitin faulty and expensive tech that require students to let the company keep their papers forever, worth it?

Any of these stupid products that claim to catch AI will not work for a number of reasons, and trying to make one that catches everything will also not work simply because these models are updated frequently, which alters their output patterns.

Most students probably just change a few things around anyway, and don't check for accuracy.

These services are a scam.

The rich kids just pay poor kids to write their research papers anyway so it's always wholly original. That's what they've been doing for decades. I had a friend who wrote research papers for wealthy kids to finance his Masters degree in the early 2000s.

It's only the average kids who can afford access to the AI and use that instead of another person.

This all feels like there's a simple solution. Have scheduled and consistent closed note (or hand written) quizzes and essay style tests. The people that use AI to do all the work will bomb or they will have learned what's necessary, and the homework was just busy work anyway.

Gotta condition americans to the norm of guilty until proven innocent early!

No, TurnItIn is garbage.

Colleges are about 50 years behind the rest of the world in technology adoption. Buying an AI detection system isn't bringing them into the future - it's holding them back. Rather than slavishly obsessing over undergrads' essay writing abilities, lesson plans should be more individualized so that essay writing en-masse is a moot point. Any essay you write would be self-motivated rather than forced.

Services like TurnItIn are unethical in the extreme and any institution that uses them should be protested, boycotted, not given a moment of peace until they drop them. These tools don’t work, are highly prone to false positives, harm neurodiverse students disproportionately, and steal content from vulnerable students who can’t opt out.

Fuck turnitin, it was bad when I started using it and only expect it to be worse now.