In a very unfortunate incident, one of the students reached out to director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR) and former Google ethicist Timnit Gebru, expressing concern when they were graded zero because an evaluation platform Turnitin stated that 67% of paper was written by AI which the student claims is untrue.
“How many people’s lives are being ruined like this. This should be unacceptable,” avered Gebru.
She said that the student currently stands with a 4.0 GPA and is a member of the President’s Honor Roll at the University. “I have tried understanding Turnitin’s methods of distinguishing AI and I still do not see how it fits within my writing,” shared Gebru, recalling the email interaction with the student.
All of this ain’t new. In another incident, a professor at the University of Texas failed the entire class because he thought the students had cheated from ChatGPT. The professor attempted to use ChatGPT to check if his students had plagiarised their assigned essays or if they had submitted original work. However, ChatGPT made an erroneous identification, flagging the students’ essays as being generated by a computer program.
Gebru had previously argued that AI systems like ChatGPT and Google Bard lack the capacity to comprehend the meaning or significance of the words they process, no matter how convincing their language is. Her former colleague Alex Hanna, also, called these platforms “Bulls*** generators.”
False Positives
Timnit seem to have taken the conversation to a whole new level, questioning the working of Turnitin’s AI detection tool, and its impact on students
Turnitin, known for checking for plagiarism for over the years, is currently being used in 10,700 secondary and higher-educational institutions, assigning “generated by AI” scores and sentence-by-sentence analysis to student work. Turnitin’s AI writing detection model is trained to detect content from the GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 language models, which includes ChatGPT. Turnitin says that text generated by ChatGPT follows a pattern and is predictable while on the other hand human writing tends to be unique and unpredictable. This method cannot be trusted blindly as it merely predicts if the text is generated by AI or not.
In a blog post Turnitin accepted that their model is not foolproof and tends to make mistakes.
However, these mistakes can have serious consequences for students. They can damage their academic standing, which, in turn, might impact their future career prospects. Besides, such incidents take an emotional toll on students, causing them stress, anxiety and mental trauma as they have to defend the authenticity of their original work.
Turnitin has two metrics to determine if text is AI generated or not. First is the document level and second is sentence level. On document level Turnit in has 1% chance of false positives.
On sentence-level false positive rate is approx 4%. This means that the specific sentence it highlights may be human-written 4 times for every 100 highlighted sentences. Even a 4, or merely 1 percent error rate might seem insignificant, but every wrongful accusation of cheating can result in disastrous consequences for a student.
According to Turnitin Chief Product Officer Annie Chechitelli, in cases where it detects less than 20% of AI writing in a document, there is a higher incidence of false positives.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post carried out a test on 16 samples of real, AI-fabricated and mixed-source essays to run past Turnitin’s detector. Turnitin identified only six out of 16 samples, completely failed on three, showed 8 percent of plagiarism on an original essay.
Masking their inability to assess accurately, Turnitin said AI writing detection false positive rate is not zero and the instructor will need to apply their professional judgment, knowledge of students, and the specific context surrounding the assignment.
Turnitin’s FAQ page only mentions that it is trained on GPT-3 and 3.5 models without providing further details about the specific parameters or models used. In contrast to Grammarly, which offers links to the original sources of copied content, detecting AI-generated content is more complex since it doesn’t exist elsewhere but is predicted to be generated by generative AI.The swift implementation of Turnitin’s AI detection software in schools raises concerns about the accuracy and fairness of its testing.
What’s the solution?
Besides Turnitin, GPTZero is known for quickly and efficiently detecting whether a text is ChatGPT-written or human-written. There are a slew of tools that detect AI generated content. Some of them include GPTZeroX, Detect GPT, Originality.ai and others. Again, the fairness and effectiveness of these models still remain dark and scary.
It is crucial to monitor Turnitin’s software to ensure it offers precise and impartial evaluations while minimizing any potential harm to innocent students who might get caught in its system.
It also becomes imperative for teachers and educators to explore new methods to check AI generated content,or eliminate it entirely. “Was talking to my cousin in high school about ChatGPT,” said the founder of healthcare startup Rupa Health, Tara Viswanathan, saying that they now must submit homework via Google Docs so the teacher can view the history to see if they really wrote it or not.
The post Turnitin Turns Off Timnit appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.