Can Turnitin detect ChatGPT? Yes, but not if you use strategies to help bypass its plagerized content filter. Discover how here.
Turnitin is an online plagiarism checker tool that’s risen to be one of the most popular in its industry over recent years. The tool offers an extensive bank of content, providing a highly accurate and comprehensive solution for those looking to check whether or not content is plagiarism. In fact, they add 15 million new web resources to their content bank each day, replenishing a huge corpus of information to cross-check against.
However, while they are effective at identifying plagerized content, people are less certain as to whether Turnitin can detect ChatGPT. ChatGPT is an industry-leading generative AI platform, boasting well over 180.5 million users around the globe.
In this article, we’ll explore how Turnitin works, discuss how effective it is at detecting AI content, and offer a few tips that can help you pass the Turnitin AI filter without detection.
Let’s dive right in.
How Do Submission Platforms Detect AI Content?
Submission platforms like Turnitin build extensive banks of information from the internet and publicly available academic sites. By collecting hundreds of thousands of pages, essays, writing projects, and sample paragraphs, they have a wide selection of content to draw upon.
When someone pastes their work into Turnitin or a similar platform, the tool will check that content against their entire bank of information. Turnitin does not flag content as ‘plagerized’, but instead offers a Similarity Score, which will highlight parts of the text that are extremely similar to the content on the page.
Educators or other people checking for plagiarism can then click on these highlighted parts to go to the webpage or digital resource where the content comes from. By reading the source content, they can then make their own decision about whether or not the content has been lifted from another source or whether it is original.
These platforms have numerous uses, particularly in fields like academia and marketing. When creating a marketing campaign, you want to be sure that you are not accidentally plagerizing another campaign or subconsciously mirroring a campaign you have seen in the past.
Equally, in academia, plagiarism is a penalizable offense and one that is severely frowned upon. Educators can put student essays or writing projects that they believe may have been plagerized from another location to quickly discover how much of the text is highlighted by the plagiarism filter.
Over the past few years, especially with the popularization of AI writing assistants and generative AI tools, plagiarism detectors have become much more popular.
Can Turnitin Detect ChatGPT Effectively?
With the popularity of AI writing tools, many writers are wondering whether or not tools like Turnitin can detect ChatGPT and other generative AI tools. While Turnitin has no problem drawing upon their bank of research to determine whether or not something is plagiarism, they did not support AI content checking until recently.
In 2023, Turnitin launched Originality, their answer to ChatGPT and other AI content writing services. This extension of their platform aims to address the prolific use of AI in academic spheres and other areas where AI content is unacceptable. Here are some of the central building blocks of the Turnitin platform:
- Low False Positive Rate: Turnitin boasts a low false-positive rate, claiming around a 1% total rate of false positives. However, some leading institutions like the University of Cambridge believe this is still far too high due to the immense stress a false accusation can cause.
- Multi-Lingual Detection: Turnitin can detect ChatGPT in several languages, having trained on a broad spetrum of texts, AI-generated paragraphs, and languages.
- Broad Spectrum of Industries: While Turnitin is primarily a tool that focuses on academia, their tool covers writing from all industries and sectors. This makes it a highly effective AI detector tool.
So, can Turnitin detect ChatGPT? The short answer is yes, and they’re continuing to hone their tool to identify AI-generated content with more precision.
Source: An example of Turnitin’s Similarity Score.
How to Reduce Detection Rate of AI Content
Although Turnitin can detect AI content, it trains on content that is directly produced by these AI writing platforms. That means that if you heavily edit the content or use another strategy, you may be able to overcome the AI detector and create content that seems 100% human-written.
Here are a few strategies you can use to reduce the detection rate of AI content:
- Use an AI Humanizer: AI Humanizer tools are platforms that you can use to make AI content sound more natural. These platforms detect sentences that are commonly used in AI writing and substitute them for alternatives that a human is more likely to write.
- Rewrite Your Content: After producing content or an essay with AI, you can then begin to edit the content. Read it through yourself and make a note of where any sentences or words feel clunky. If you read something that doesn’t quite sound right, rewrite it to make it sound more like your own voice. Heavily editing content can make it more natural and bypass AI detectors.
- Use AI Content as a Template: When you ask AI to produce content, you can take the output and read through it as a baseline template. With the general structure and ideas of the content, you can then write your own content. As you’ll have something to take inspiration from, the process will be much faster than writing from scratch.
These strategies will help to make sure that Turnitin cannot detect your ChatGPT content.
Source: Phrasly.AI’s AI Humanizer tool in action.
Key Takeaways: Can Turnitin Detect ChatGPT
Turnitin can detect ChatGPT and other generative AI writing platforms. With its extensive corpus of information, one that’s typically shared by platforms like ChatGPT, it can easily identify AI-generated content. Additionally, Turnitin is improving their AI detection software every day by expanding their contact with AI platforms, making this a highly effective AI detector.
Alternatively, if you want to utilize AI-generated content without triggering detection, you can use Phrasly.AI’s Content Humanizer tool. Phrasly can help you create content that sounds more natural than AI content and will fly under the radar of tools like Turnitin.
