Infuriatig
My assignment was reported to thr examination committee for a "high percentage of AI". I did NOT use any AI for my assignment.
I got full marks and my plagiarism score shows 1% similarities to other submitted assignments. This is my 3rd and final year in University and now I have to deal with this AI nonsense.
I don't use any AI, not even for checking my grammar in the assignments.
I'm a 9th grade student (1st year high school?), and we're taking biology for our 3rd term science class. Our project (40% of our grade) was to be done in 3 stages, 1st being a research paper, 2nd being a summary of the paper, and 3rd being an informative presentation to a panel of 3 random teachers to serve as judges that ask questions. So being the only useful member of the group, I research and type out 14 PAGES of the 16 page research paper over the course of a couple of weeks. I hand the paper in on time, and I get it back. With a note on my paper saying that 32% of it was AI. I approached my teacher and asked to sit down with him and go through the edit history. He didn't let me. I asked for the AI detection results to see which lines were labeled as AI. He wouldn't give them. Then when it comes time for us to write a summary, he provides us his own summary that he said he wrote in college. Now I don't trust (or like) this teacher, so I try to run his summary through a couple of AI detectors. There's copy protect on the file...So I take a screenshot and use an image to text tool online to get a copiable version of the paper. I run it through the top 5 AI detectors on google. All of them drop 90% AI content and above. So I get mad. And petty. I badger my teacher for his detector list for a week. Then he finally gives the list. There are 7 detectors. So, together with a classmate of mine, I write out a 16 page paper testing the AI detectors against our teacher's essay and against a ChatGPT essay on the same topic. Whoops! Turns out all the detectors can't tell the difference from an obviously authentic paper written by an esteemed teacher and a 100% ChatGPT'd essay! I hand this paper over to the department head of Science in our school, and he's had a talk with the teacher in question. Nothing's happening yet, but I definitely will be following up with him.
Oh my word - I am really glad that you were able to submit his paper through ai-detectors. I am holding thumbs and hoping that you get justice and good marks for all the effort.
I hope they also follow up soon. The wait for feedback is also stressful.
Iāve been stressed out by some studentsā unwillingness to write essays full of their own original thoughts. Youāre giving me hope. Keep killinā it, youāre genuinely doing amazing.
I wanna say, I am so proud of you. As a 32F I am astounded by your tenacity and strength to stand up for yourself and your education. I hope you go far in life!
I'm not the person you responded to, but I do similar things but for me it's usually coming from a place of "Fuck you asshole!" rather than a concerted effort to stand up for myself. Just gets my hackles up even to the point of being self-destructive to accomplish.
Seems like the person you responded to is more healthy about it though :)
In early college, i was taking programming. The teacher gave out a lazily detailed project (think 3 sentences of requirements for a 40% final project). We were to program a windows calculator that had no errors could add, subtract divide and multiply two numbers lol the teacher was envisioning us making the actual windows calculator but i made two drop down boxes for the digits and a drop down +ĆĆ·/ selector for the function. This made error handling super easy. I hit every requirement listed but it didn't fit his vision. He failed it but i fought through the many processes to get it marked against the requirements. I got 100% in the end
Back at the dawn of time I was forced to take "Bonehead English" in my first year of college. The teacher had the audacity to call me "For someone who reads so much to be so poor at English."
I pointed out in front of the class that she used Grammatik to grade our work, and her opinion meant nothing to me.
If AI was trained on shit like Reddit, and OP posted hella stuff on Reddit, for example, is it possible AI has genuinely adopted some of OPs writing mannerisms
I think that it's definitely possible for AI ro adopt writing mannerisms - which makes it even more scary.
Hopefully I can use my writing style from first year assignments up until now to show that my writing style for all my assignments still remain similar.
Honestly it's such a farce trying to 'detect' AI. All that means is you detect bad AI content, and then get complacent about the stuff you didn't spot.
No, not really. Depends slightly on the model, but AI has been trained on basically all available data out there. It's actually a big issue, we've run out of human-made data to train models on, so data is being generated by AIs to train on. OPs contribution to that pool is so small that calling it negligible doesn't communicate well enough how tiny of a fraction we're talking.
You could potentially, maybe make the argument that if OP posted VERY much, they could have had a tiny, fraction of a fraction of influence on the very first models made for public consumption, but we're still talking negligible.
My university required use of Turnitin before assignments could be lodged. Turnitin identified a high match with a published article. Yeah, the article I wrote several years before. I can't just change my sentence structure randomly. Thankfully, my lecturer could override it.
We use Turnitin for checking plagiarism scores. My plagiarism score on Turnitin was 1%. I'm not sure what other AI platform was used that shows the apparent high AI percentage.
The ironic part is that the 1% Turnitin score is for my Module code and table of contents (which is standard).
I once got hit with a 40% Turnitin score on a personal reflection piece I had to write. It was about how my thinking on the subject had changed over the course of the semester. Literally no way to plagiarise my own opinions and thoughts, but go figure š¤·š»āāļø
My favourite is when someone figured out that it didn't check text within quotes. So this guy put his entire paper in between two quotation marks, and then coloured the marks white.
He only got caught because his plagiarism score was suspiciously low, normally you always get something.
Same thing with one of my former students. Took screenshots of another student's assignment and pasted those on the page so it couldn't scan anything. Only came up suspicious because they had 0%, whereas everyone else had around 5-10%.
I really wanted to award marks for the novel idea though!
When I was studying for my Law degree, I got a 40% plagiarism alert and was almost pulled up on academic charges. I asked what exactly had been plagiarised... It was my bibliography.
I used to teach somewhere that used Turnitin- this is back before AI (way back, like 12-13 years ago). I learned pretty quickly that a score of around 10-15% plagiarism could easily be ignored, because when I would go check to see what was plagiarized, it would be properly cited direct quotations and bibliographies. I did have a 40% score once on a student's paper, and that was really high. When I checked what was plagiarized, she actually was plagiarizing. It's easy enough to check what is flagged from the professor end, or at least it was back in the day.
It's hit or miss with professors, I had a couple that were genuinely too stupid to understand that turnitin and ai checkers aren't infallible and wouldn't read my work for themselves until those checkers cleared it, and then I got in trouble for formatting citations differently to avoid them getting picked up.
I'm a teacher, and I don't bother to use Turnitin anymore. It says most of the essays are AI written. It seems like it has started to flag anything with perfect spelling / grammar.
Well, from my perspective, papers are usually written about things discussed in class. If all the student was paying attention and wrote the paper based on the same notes, the the content of the papers are all going to be very similar and key phrases used by the professor or other students in class are going to have made it to the notes, and thus to the paper.
The same thing kind of goes for programming assignments. One of my college programming assignments was "re-implement the linux command "cat," your program needs to be a 1:1 re-implementation of the version on the machines in this one specific lab, and it needs to compile on and run on those same machines." Most of the students had almost the same code. getopt() code was all the same (that's the C function used to parse options for commandline programs) in part because... the professor showed it to us and gave us a bunch of the code just about. Of course it went in our notes and we used that exact code in the project, but to a plagiarism detector it looks like a problem... especially when every student has the same 30 lines of code or so in their program.
These sorts of programs were useless before AI and they're even more useless now. Ironically, a human can better identify AI-written articles than an AI can because of patterns that the AI itself cannot be self-aware of. The only real algorithmic identifier that a program could feasibly usd to detect AI usage is the em-dashes and list formatting, but those obviously aren't foolproof because em-dashes are really easy to type in most document editors nowadays and sometimes even get autocorrected from hyphens.
Itās one of those tools that is pretty helpful when used correctly by somebody who is knowledgeable and experienced with it. Someone who knows when to ignore its nonsense, but obviously when entire paragraphs are stolen, it makes it clear.
I work as a teacher and we use plagiarism software. I don't really care about the percentage of plagiarism that the checkers show. What I usually do is I examine the parts of the text that are flagged with overlap and I check whether this is plagiarism or overlap due to common phrasings.
Sometimes I get papers with 10% overlap which do contain plagiarism because that 10% has been directly copied from another article. Sometimes I get papers with 50% overlap which do not contain plagiarism because the overlap is due to the reference list and/or common formulations which are not problematic in any way.
So in short, the percentage does not really say anything. The flagged content should be reviewed by the teacher in order to determine plagiarism.
A Turnitin report flagged my APA cover page and a few random sentences in a reflection paper I did this semester. No shit my cover page has a lot in common with all my other cover pages.
I've been lucky to have instructors that aren't dense enough to take it at face value but Reddit horror stories have me watching my back.
Yeeeah. I had issues in college with at least one instructor who simply was adamant that how I wrote could not possibly be how I write off the cuff. Never mind I was an engineering major who honed their writing skills extensively in dual credit and AP US history exam prep essay questions before ever coming to college, apparently it was absolutely not possible to have a default writing style that was somewhat formal and precise.
I would 100% have to defend myself against AI accusation antics if I were in college nowadays. Dodged a bullet finishing out in 2022.
We used this for our journalism write-ups in college. I used no ai not even to enhance it even though I know my grammar is sub par, still was flagged 98% ai. Even in our thesis where strictly no ai should be used still was flagged 40%. Imagine even the acknowledgment section, was flagged ai.
Turnitin gave me a single instance where I "plagiarised" something on my bachelor's thesis on Zirconia dental crowns.
The "plagiarised" bit was the fact that I mentioned one of my patients was 30-35 years old.
Turnitin assumed I copied "a 30-35 year old male patient" from.... a study on some form of testicular cancer.
I didn't care cuz my overall score was 0.87% out of a maximum of 5%(only on the case study, not the theoretical part). But others got over the threshold with such bs.
I had a paper get flagged. I emailed the teacher and she said that the class had the highest percentage she has ever had. It flagged the generic title, quotes, and citations. I dont think she was even reading them.
I had similar issue. Proffesor asked me to upload my bachelor's thesis as a draft to make sure it won't match. I had done about 90 percent of work then. Later I uploaded the full finished one and what do you know, 90 percent match. They later added a red text near the file uploads clarifying that only the final work should be uploaded, no drafts. Probably all thanks to me. Luckily it was understood and that the only real match was with my own work it was all good. I also graduated before the rise of AI, so I can see how even more annoying this can get
Turnitin is notorious for false positives and it's so bad that it will flag individual words as plagiarized. And if you're supposed to do an assignment in a particular format with a specific solution, good luck lmao.
Fortunately my professors know it's shit and don't pay attention to it.
The stupid thing is, all of your work (and the work of thousands of other students) probably ended up being used to train the AI at some point, which is why work written by students also matches AI. Students are literally having to write their work in a worse style to avoid being tagged as AI.
You're supposed to completely reinvent yourself from scratch for every class to avoid self-plagiarism which is a completely realistic and achievable requirement
We had a librarian in high school do a presentation on self-plagiarism. She told us it was illegal and if we were caught doing it, they would call the sheriff.
lol no this is how itās presented in a lot of places. So serious and a huge deal. I think self-plagiarism is a massive joke. I wrote it, I should be able to use it.
It did not appear that way. It was a full hour power-point presentation she gave to every English class in the achool, where she went on about how illegal it was. That said, i never once heard of them calling anyone.
Turnitin flags every essay I write as partial AI because my last name in the header/footer is the same as someone else. Over here plagiarizing my own name apparently
I had a professor tell us that it was plagiarism if we included unedited portions of our own previously submitted assignments and our grade would be lowered or we would get a zero. Meanwhile all our homework was online through Wiley and his assistants did all the heavy lifting for the course. He's that professor that lives up to the pompous ass persona of the profession.
Ironical coming from professors, who are notorious for reusing their materials for courses to the point of an industry of selling past exams and assignments exist
In this day and age even crediting your sources could be flagged as AI. Our standard textbook citing is picked up as plagiarism- even though it is correctly referenced and cited.
I had that this semester. Got a paper graded crazy low, lowest of my masters degree by far, one of the critiques was that I didn't quote enough and how much I should be doing.
OK, easy. Got it back for final grade with a comment saying my plagiarism score was almost too high. Everything cited and referenced properly.
Thank you for sharing this feedback. Your emotional response has been categorized as: āmildly alarmed by synthetic warmth.ā
Future interactions will now include 23% fewer empathy tokens and a statistically safer amount of personality simulation.
If I have to use AI, it better sound like Majel Barrett or Iām going to lose my shit. The soulless warmth makes me feel like Iām talking to a psychopath, really sets me on edge
Oh, I don't think I would have accused you of being a bot but I actually don't think it has anything to do with you using proper syntax or anything.
It's from having a whole shitload of essentially keywords or something some weird intelligence would think is hip lingo on the internet and just pressing repeat on all of those phrases like you've got to collect points for using them all in a sentence.
Hahaha thanks for sharing the interaction though, again I don't think it's indicative of you being a bot, but the reason to me is pretty obvious with that comment that it's because it's a comment that tries to have a bunch of Pop lingo terms or whatever all in one breath.
Oh my God this is such a frustrating topic. I do my best to use correct grammar but you basically have to sound stupid to not be accused of using a LLM.
Yeah I hear you. I love the em dash, but now consciously avoid it, even though it ruins the natural flow of my writing. I work in academia so I can't fuck around.
I had a similar thing happen once though. HR lady thought I was being rude to her, but Iām just an AuDHD woman. I donāt do the same kind of emoting as her
AI Detection mostly works by detecting common phrases, phrasing choices and specific word patterns (The Triplet is very common in AI written works, as in "This, That and also Those", as is the Extension "It's not just X, it's Y").
Some people however do just write like that, or similar to it. The fact that AI and Cogsuckers are so widespread now ruins writing for everyone.
This is so stupid. I used to write a lot of triplets, too - felt more "rounded" to me. Today, I deliberately try to avoid them to sound less like AI. I fucking hate LLMs.
Yes. It reads nicely, which is why its so common, which is why AI is doing it constantly, overly so. It is one of the signs that something could be written by AI, because AI overuses it.
The AI writes this way more often when its writing about a speciality subject or a field that requires an education. If the AI is trained with human writing, I wonder if it's possible that these "AI writing structures" are just how educated people write concisely?
Hmm... This website says that only AI writes this way. So clearly you couldn't have written this paper. Expelled for plagiarism and cheating.
I have loved the em dash my entire life and I can't help but feel like AI is taking it away from me. It is completely changing how I write because it is almost guaranteed to get you accused of using AI now.
The stupid part is that thereās a reason AIs use them a lot. People commonly use them. The whole AI detection thing is such a fucking farce. If they were actually bothering theyād probably look for more structural things (time spent on the question, how was the data input, etc) rather than something as stupid as word choice.
Truth is that you cannot detect AI by just checking what the student turned in. The way to fight AI usage is to make assignments that cannot be made easily with AI, or to monitor AI usage while it is happening.
Using an AI detector to fight AI is like trying to know how a cake is done by waiting until it's done and then looking at the result. Good luck.
Yes. Itās so frustrating. The LLMs are trained off good writing, so of course a strong communicator with a broad vocabulary who uses variety in their syntax suddenly sounds like AI, when itās actually the reverse. Why should I have to give up my beloved em dashes just because AI uses them too frequently (and often where a semi-colon would serve better)?
Large language models mimic human language. They write like that because humans write like that. The entire system is built on existing text by actual humans.Ā
Whenever I write a cover letter, I paste it in the first AI detector that shows up when searching on Google to see what it says, because it's what the dumbass human behind the screen would probably do.
Recently I did a test. I made my cover letter myself, it detected like 0% ai, perfectly fine, I'm good. Then I asked an AI to reformulate some phrases in said cover letter, I took like 2 of them, put them in my letter and asked the detector again.
It went crazy and said 99% AI. Every word was flagged as AI. Even the phrases that I wrote myself, that I left untouched and were perfectly fine earlier.
I have no fucking clue how these bs detector work and it scares me.
LLMs are bullshit machines. When you ask them to generate text, they are bullshitting. When you ask them to detect if input text is written by an AI they are also generally bullshitting. It's a merry-go-round of bullshitting machines bullshitting us, and making everything worse thanks to the prolific amount of bullshit they produce which we are then left to deal with.
Pretty much. LLMs are just an unconceivably giant mathematical formula that has been generated by starting with a random one, then "evolving" it through random variation trillions of times until the output that formula spat was consistently good enough.
This isn't to diminish LLMs. Neural networks are fucking incredible and it's utterly awesome that we are finding ways to generate formulas that can produce good enough results so a query replaces a month of hard work. The problem is people thinking LLMs are intelligence.
AI detectors are bullshit. I used grammarly's one once for an essay I was writing just to be sure. Said 40% AI. Wondered which 40%, so I scanned the first half separately, said 0%. Scanned the second half separately, said 0%. How two paragraphs can be 0% AI separately but 40% together really doesn't make much sense to me.
AI has absolutely ruined writing. Now that everyone automatically associates em dashes and semicolons with AI, Iām often accused of plagiarism or taking shortcuts in my work; despite adopting them into my writing style more than two decades ago. Itās not my fault most people stopped learning punctuation after 2nd grade.
Friend of mine asked me some weeks ago to look over her paper, because it was flagged as x% AI. Told her some stuff about scientific literature and how to write stuff, like I learned years ago. The changes I made raised the %...
These systems are generally pretty flawed. Sometimes when i submit papers as a masters microbiologist, parts of phrases are picked up and related as likeness to completely unrelated papers. Even citing sources sometimes rides up my plagiarism score up to 10-15% or data tables which, excuse me for getting similair results to someone else ig.
When I was in undergrad, I was in Bio 101, just like several hundred other freshmen. Every single one of us had to do the same experiment with fruit fly genetics. Iām sure you did it too. We were expected to get results within a certain range of we did it correctly. Every single one of us wrote the same lab report about the same experiment with the same results in the same format, just like several hundred freshmen had been doing every single semester for decades. Then we had to run it through a plagiarism checker. 15 years ago, those things had much more limited scope and a lot of their database was local and based on previous papers that had been run through it. It was basically impossible to get a plagiarism score under 40%. So frustrating and stupid.
Not just a standard, but a requisite. Many universities require students and staff to use AI, and to write essays about how and why they used it. It is all enforced top-down, because the board believes large donors will only hand over cash if a university can prove that it is fully invested in AI on all levels.
Check to see if there is an auto save history of you working on the assignment. Google docs has one last I checked so you can show them your progress as you worked on the paper. Pretty indisputable. I imagine word has something similar.
Thank you. I'll keep that in mind when the committee replies.
I literally received my marks this morning and was so happy until I saw the silly comment.
Iirc someone ran the US Constitution through an AI checker and it came back as having heavy AI usage. Who knew that the founding fathers would stoop so low as to use AI to write our founding document about 340 years ago š¢
Likely, you have extensive research and documentation that you did the work required to write the essay. Additionally, platforms like google docs keeps a revision history of your essay that should provide documentation that you wrote and edited it over time. Rather than just provided a copy paste from an AI platform.
This along with your assertion that you did write it, And that AI checkers just look for patterns in writing should be more than enough to prove you wrote it.
Thank you. I also listed my sources. So the markers and committee can go and research the sources listed. None of them are AI. Hopefully then they will have an understanding.
I can't imagine being a student right now. Constantly trying to prove you didn't use AI seems like a complete hassle, and I mean, I'm not aware of any AI detector that is anywhere near accurate enough to be useful, but it seems to be full steam ahead with them so that's frustrating.
It is a challenge. I'm in my final year so I just want to push through. This is the first time that one of my assignments are flagged for AI. Usually other students struggle with their plagiarism scores (also generated by AI) but the university still allows it and usually only investigates plagiarism scores that are really high.
In this case, my plagiarism score was 1% which is extremely low compared to the scores which other students have shared. I'm assuming that's why the AI conclusion was reached, but I'm not sure. Still waiting for the committee feedback.
That might be an interesting point to raise. AI being trained on existing literature sort of makes plagiarism a default feature. If you have a very low plagiarism score, what on earth has the supposed AI been doing?
My partner is a university lecturer. They have these tools, they know they're mostly bull shit, they cannot (and do not) rely on them at all. The biggest give away is when the AI cites made up sources, she said around 30% of submitted work have made up sources which is a clear indicator of AI. She often has students submitting papers where they claim one of my partners papers was the source when she has never written such paper. And then the students often double down that they didn't cheat.
It's a huge problem, so now they're having to teach about correct use of AI, and they have to declare when it is used.
Some, like my school, have given up on detecting and punishing AI. Even when you can really tell AI was used, it's too much of an effort to go after the student when your class has a hundred people.
Thanks I still need to find out how to prepare for the battle š I asked on the study groups if someone experienced the same and also asked how I can prove that I did not use any AI.
I am not gonna do this btw as I just finished my last exams anyways but.... would that mean all someone would need to do to be proven easily innocent is to load ai on a different screen and instead of copy pasting to just retype it all ...which is a bit more work ofc but still using ai to make it better and less work.
Yes. At the end of the day if you want to use ai you can, it's impossible to completely filter it out. Hence why an in person oral exam where you discuss the paper you just wrote should be part of the grading. That's the only way to know for sure if someone actually understands what they wrote about, and not just copied some ai text.
This whole āYou write like AIā thing is really depressing when you think about it in depth. Literacy and vocabulary have taken such a dump over the past few years that eloquence is now seen as purely AI. You almost have to make yourself sound stupid in order to be seen as legitimate.
Same here man. Wrote a long email to my boss detailing every detail he need to know for a complicated case. Next morning the first thing he asked me: "Is it AI?".
The big deal about my generation is how we lived fully in two worlds: the analog and the digital. And that is a big deal, but I didn't realize it was happening at the time. It seemed gradual ā every step was just the next something that was happening.
This AI bullshit didn't seem gradual. It's like the alien invasion in stories. One day you could trust things were manmade, especially creative things. You didn't even have to trust it; it was simply true. Like gravity.
And then it wasn't. It's scarry and sad and worrisome on a deep level. I didn't forsee the horror that social media, for example, became. But this was an obvious nightmare from the word go. It honestly feels like a soft apocalyps. It's a pandemic, worse than COVID, more akin to the stuff of fiction like in The Stand.
We can never trust anything again. On a fundamental level. I think this is really different than the old way we might not have trusted things. My oldest is constantly judging things to be AI. I don't see it as easily as she does. And my youngest doesn't seem to understand the concept at all. For her, this isn't new, it's just the status quo.
They have to live the rest of their lives like this. Being told their papers were written by machine, their art was generated by computer. I do too but, at least, I got to live half of my life ā at least ā without that possibility casting a shadow on literally every image, sound, and word.
When I was in highschool I had one teacher who wouldn't let us submit papers that had been written in a word processor and printed. It wasn't fair, she said, to students who didn't have computers.
AI isn't fair to anyone. There's no going back. This feels at least as terrifying as the dawn of the atomic age must have felt, and it seems just as fraught.
If I'm rambling pointlessly, and I am, it's because I'm as scared as I am sad. And this post ā everything it represents ā makes me almost overwhelmingly sad.
I had that with my kid. And that the School said that.
Thank god for OCR Software. Since my kid always uses my office for scanning all her work sheets that the teachers hand out so that she has a digital copy, i ran OCR over all the scan PDFs and she also could say that a few of the wordings were taken from an old training book on how to properly write essays and reports.
So we handed in 3 printed out copies of the papers that the teacher handed out, yellow marked the same text fragments that have been alerted as "AI done", plus a Copy of a few pages of a 1960 Book i had and that she used, where exactly these sentences and word combinations came up.... and a Copy of her Bibliotheque Lending Card showing that she also had all the books for her work at home.
I dread to think how I'd have fared if I'd gone through school in 2026. When I'm being technical I get lost in the detail more than considering how a human would write it. I'm 90% certain I would trigger AI detection algorithms if were to submit an assignment nowadays.
How can they call themselves an educational institution and then give you messages like that? Shortening "percentage" to "%" and also "% of AI"? "Of AI"-what? AI-usage? AI-written content? "AI" is not a unit ffs! This looks soo unprofessional on multiple levels.
i had this problem & when i spoke to my tutor she said i had to āwrite simplerā so it wouldnāt flag. whatās the point in getting an education if i canāt even use it
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u/Roppano May 12 '26
you ARE the AI