Many assume SafeAssign, Blackboard’s plagiarism detection tool, can always detect AI-generated work. While it’s designed to catch copied material, it has limitations when it comes to AI-created content. AI writing tools like GPT-3 and ChatGPT generate unique text patterns that might not trip traditional plagiarism filters. Although there are tools specifically for AI detection, it’s not foolproof. Both SafeAssign and Originality.ai are plagiarism detection tools, however, SafeAssign is primarily used for academia and Originality.ai is geared toward content publishers, writers, and website owners.
Students have been using text spinners—also called rewriter or paraphrase tools—for years as a means of avoiding automated plagiarism detection. While those tools once primarily replaced key words with synonyms—a process Chris Sadler dubbed "Rogeting"—now they also restructure sentences, making the source of the original text more difficult to pinpoint. Originality reports from SafeAssign show the text match percentage with other sources, helping educators see if content is copied or too different from a student’s past work. These tools compare student’s work against lots of online sources, including billions of web pages and millions of academic essays from SafeAssign’s database. SafeAssign (which is available in Blackboard) is used as a tool to determine if students are potentially submitting work as their own that has been previously submitted by themselves or is the work of others.
ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is an advanced language model that uses machine learning to generate human-like text. It’s quite good at writing essays, writing articles, summarizing text, translating languages, and even creating poetry. They are a helpful tool in combating a huge rise in students using AI to do their assignments.
All students who’ve been found to violate academic honesty by using AI software go through the Dean of Students Office. With the wealth of data the AI is trained on, a detailed prompt can safeassign detect chatgpt write a student’s assignment for them, to varying degrees of success. The impressive aspect of this tool is its flexibility in handling enormous lengths of text.
On the other hand, if the AI-generated text closely mirrors existing academic sources, does safeassign detect chatgpt might still catch it. This limitation raises questions about the software’s effectiveness in an era where students are increasingly using AI tools. SafeAssign is primarily designed to identify instances of plagiarism by comparing submissions to a comprehensive database and flagging similarities. It is a tool widely used in academic settings to ensure students submit original work and uphold academic integrity. When a student submits a document to SafeAssign, the plagiarism checker goes to work, analyzing other academic and online sources to determine if there is a match. Not only can it alert professors of any possible instances of plagiarism, but it can also help students properly cite and reference their sources when writing their papers.
The rigorous academic research and publishing process gets a trusted tool to ensure the originality of scholarly work. Using AI to aid writing is not inherently illegal, but ethical and policy considerations come into play. Institutions may have guidelines on originality that require students to do most of the work themselves. Using AI without acknowledgment can be considered unethical and may violate academic policies.