The Washington PostThe Washington Post

We tested a new ChatGPT-detector for teachers. It flagged an innocent student

By Geoffrey A. Fowler

03 Apr 2023 · 8 min read

Editor's Note

Trying to detect the use of AI in writing school essays is a slippery slope as the software returns many false positives thereby targetting innocent students notes this investigation in The Post.

High school senior Lucy Goetz got the highest possible grade on an original essay she wrote about socialism. So imagine her surprise when I told her that a new kind of educational software I've been testing claimed she got help from artificial intelligence.

A new AI-writing detector from Turnitin - whose software is already used by 2.1 million teachers to spot plagiarism - flagged the end of her essay as likely being generated by ChatGPT.

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