Whether or not Turnitin can detect ChatGPT has become a major aspect of the usage and popularity of both these tools. Ever since ChatGPT became open for public use, its popularity has risen. People have begun to use it for various purposes, and it has proven to be largely beneficial. However, with all good things, there are some drawbacks, and many institutes, such as universities and various employers, have an emphasis on keeping their content original.
To prevent cheating and maintain authenticity in these areas, various software like Turnitin attempted to create something that could detect whether ChatGPT has been used. To answer the frequently asked question of whether Turnitin can detect ChatGPT, keep reading.
If you’d like to learn more, you can check out other articles like how to use ChatGPT and retrieve your ChatGPT history. You can even find some ChatGPT alternatives.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a chatbot that works using Artificial intelligence. It also classifies as a natural language processing tool which means that it uses features such as text and identifies what the user is trying to say. As a result, you can have conversations similar to those with another human being.
Because of the data it has been trained with, you can easily find answers and outright solve various problems and questions that you might have difficulty finding through search engines.
Moreover, it also can summarize or simplify complex questions or concepts. Since it is online and free to use, anybody can easily access it. It’s frequently used by students to write essays and paragraphs on simple prompts and even used by programmers to solve various complex problems.
Because of its increasing popularity and ability to simplify things, it has steadily gained a lot of popularity. As a result, the need for something that could detect content written by chatbots or artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT has risen.
What is Turnitin?
Turnitin is also an online service that is available to all. Unlike ChatGPT, Turnitin does require a subscription for you to access it. The primary purpose of Turnitin is to detect plagiarism in written content. Initially, it scoured the internet for similar content as the one provided to it. As a result, it highlights all lines extracted directly from websites, research papers, and so on. It is one of the most reliable software out there for plagiarism detection.
Since ChatGPT usage has been steadily rising, Turnitin decided to expand its features to detect the use of AI chatbot content, such as ChatGPT. It works similarly to its plagiarism-detecting services, but this time, it identifies the likelihood of AI usage in content. As a result, if any unfair advantage was utilized to curate the piece, it could be flagged with ease.
Can Turnitin detect ChatGPT?
Yes, Turnitin does detect content written by ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools. However, the technology is fairly recent and needs some fine-tuning to be more accurate.
The first step is to upload the file onto the Turnitin official site. This step is fairly similar to uploading files to check for plagiarism. So, if you have used Turnitin in the past, this won’t be an issue. After uploading, Turnitin scans each line and compares it to sources available in its database. While this process might seem like it will take a while, it usually produces reports within a few minutes.
For now, Turnitin detects AI and provides a similarity index and originality report of the text provided to display the level of AI used in the report. The similarity index is a scale the tool uses to provide a percentage of the amount of AI content in the text. The originality report adds to this and highlights all individual sentences or paragraphs where ChatGPT was used.
How does Turnitin detect ChatGPT?
The main reason Turnitin came out with this detector so quickly is that students had been utilizing ChatGPT in a way that took away from their learning process. As a result, the need was drastic.
Turnitin’s AI or ChatGPT screening detects content that seems like a Chatbot wrote it. If you’ve ever used ChatGPT, you might have noticed certain consistencies and patterns. Text is often in a specific tone and follows some standard punctuation practices.
Moreover, its grammatical styles are pretty specific. Turnitin uses these techniques to judge the intensity of ChatGPT used within the uploaded text. In fact, if you understand these similarities, you might be able to identify text generated by ChatGPT by simply reading it yourself. It'll become pretty obvious with some practice and experience with ChatGPT, and you’ll have no issues telling them apart.
In fact, sometimes, if you feed ChatGPT its own prompt and ask it if it has written it, the Chatbot itself is able to discern this. Naturally, you can be more creative with your prompts and ask for paraphrasing to try and overcome this issue. But the point stands that ChatGPT is still quite easy to detect for modern plagiarism software such as Turnitin.
If you found this article interesting, we have plenty more about ChatGPT and other AI chatbots. You can find out how to fix the “something seems to have gone wrong” error and the “conversation not found error.” You could even check out the differences between Google Bard and ChatGPT.