AI taking over education: millions of school papers written by AI

AI is slowly taking over various industries

Since the beginning of the age of new technology, people have voiced their worries about new technology, such as artificial intelligence. These devices, gadgets, networks, and mechanisms that make our lives easier have been taking over every day. Smartphones evolved into smart cars and smart homes, and nowadays, many people use AI devices and technology every day.

This technological evolution is often called an AI revolution, and people talk about artificial intelligence taking over and getting our jobs, overtaking industries and the world. Some industries that heavily use AI tools like ChatGPT even got a little too excited to use it, so people get under fire for it.

Technology can replace many tasks and even professions or job places. That is true; however, there are ways to utilize technology properly and avoid abusing it. Some things can be helpful in various industries, such as media, research, programming, engineering, digital design, and creative industries.

However, the fact that AI can write essays, bachelor's research, and other papers excites some people. Plagiarism has now become an issue in various industries, such as publishing, media, news, and education.

There are particular tools developed that can detect when the text is written by a human and when it is AI-generated. Those are not fully accurate, but people get a lot of heat for plagiarism and scandals in media companies have been pretty rough.

22 million school papers are written by AI

Once these AI tools started to take over the internet, many began to talk about the danger of this technology. Some addressed the plagiarism issue and education. Now, researchers shed light on the hypothesis that people will stop writing themselves when there is an easier way out.

Plagiarism detection company Turnitin released data with claims that over 20 million papers submitted by students last year have been written by generative artificial intelligence tools^[1]. The release of ChatGPT in 2022 attracted millions of students to the ability of easier tasks. These chatbots can help brainstorm ideas, inspire essays, and even write entire school papers^[2].

Schools have found it challenging to monitor students and have started using software to detect plagiarism because it's becoming very common. Turnitin, which checks for plagiarism, has examined over 200 million essays mostly from high school and college students.

It was found that 11% of these papers might have up to 20% of their content written by AI, and 3% had 80% or more content created by AI. Turnitin claims that its technology is very good at telling the difference between text written by humans and AI, and it is designed specifically for student work.

Teachers need to change things up due to the usage of AI tools

Annie Chechitelli, a top executive at Turnitin, told University Business that dealing with AI in schools depends a lot on students being honest and teachers being thorough. She mentioned that teachers might need to give more challenging assignments because of this. Papers are written by AI tools and not students, teachers use AI to grade them and the usage of AI in education overall raises ethical questions^[3].

A. Chechitelli also spoke about future concerns: whether AI might start copying itself and what it means when there's less writing by humans online. She believes we are just beginning to understand how AI writing will change what we do and how we do it. Her thoughts are timely, as AI could soon be used to review its work. This follows news that Texas plans to use AI to grade student exams, which they say could save millions in labor costs.

While many teachers are looking for ways to manage the widespread use of AI, there are worries that plagiarism detection tools like Turnitin might mistakenly accuse students of cheating. However, Turnitin reports that their system rarely makes such errors. This is a new age of technology that means we need ot think about more things like plagiarism and possibility of cheating using such technology.

However, tools also make mistakes. Articles and research papers might get flagged as written with the help of AI tools, but in reality, they are written by humans alone. This is also an issue that foreign people writing in English might face since sometimes AI tools detect their work as AI-generated^[4].