If you are concerned a student may have used ChatGPT or another generative AI to complete their assignment, what should you do?
If you think an assignment may have been generated by AI, there are several tools that can assist in determining the likelihood that a student used AI. It is important to note, however, that none of these are foolproof, and may return false positives. The best first step is usually to have a conversation about the assignment with the student.
GPTZero allows you to copy and paste text into its web-based AI detection tool. GPTZero analyzes a text to look for what it describes as "perplexity" and "burstiness." Perplexity determines the likelihood that a word was recommended by an AI (assuming that humans choose more varied words). Burstiness measures the frequency in spikes of unique language throughout the document (assuming that an AI will be less variable).
Writer.com offers an AI content detector that can detect the likelihood that up to 1500 characters of text were AI-generated. This detector examines whether a text is likely to follow the same pattern of words that a large language model would. Since this model is based on the sequence of words, it may flag works are being AI generated if the writer uses similar word sequences in their writing.
The evolution of large language AI
It is important to note that AI is constantly evolving, and the reliability of these tools (both for negative and positive results) will be incredibly variable. These detection tools are meant to provide guidance that can begin a conversation. Ultimately, the best way to decrease AI use for assignments is to build assignments that leverage personal experiences and ask students to submit work in different pieces and with different revisions. Alternatively, having students start with an AI tool can allow them to elaborate on and revise provided outputs to create something new.