Youth Edge: As ChatGPT produced assignments get more innovative, teachers scrabble for better detection tools

“I use Gemini and ChatGPT for gathering information or other creative tasks such as writing something. Today, there are tools that teachers can use to catch and prevent use of AI. But there are many tools like QuillBot paraphraser to rewrite and ZeroGPT to detect AI percentage content so one can be sure AI usage is not detected,” said the 21-year-old Ritwik living and studying in Shivaji Nagar.

Some teachers are trying to give more handwritten assignments to prevent copy-pasting and others are trying to give more critical and analytical questions and subjective essays.  However, these strategies are not foolproof.

Savitribai Phule Pune University has had the plagiarism detecting software Turnitin for over a decade and a feature of detecting AI-generated text was introduced in the software last year. However, about a month ago. that feature was made a paid one and the university has not had access to it since, confirmed IT head Ankush Kulkarni.

“While we have this facility available to all faculty members, how many teachers use it for every single internal assignment is upto them,” Kulkarni added.

Others like Rachana Khake, head of the animation department at Fergusson College, depend on their teaching experience to detect AI-usage. “Students are definitely trying to use AI tools in assignments. We normally know students’ capacities so it’s quite easy to differentiate between AI-generated content and original content written by the student,” she said.

However, this strategy fails when a large number of students are involved, another teacher pointed out.

An English teacher from one of the reputed SPPU-affiliated colleges of the city, said, “It is very difficult to prove that a student has used AI when a complete paper is in front of you. At best, one can give standardised marks.”

He added, “While checking papers, I can clearly see that many assignments are too similar. It is the same kind of impersonal writing and sometimes too good to be truly written by undergraduate students. Sometimes, it is disheartening as a teacher of literature because the essence is in reading and writing from one’s own perspective.”

“AI can be useful but in using it a lot, we are losing the personal touch. Everyone has an authentic way of writing or creating something and if we’re seeking a mechanised medium to do that, then it’s unfair to ourselves as well,” said Priyanshi Kharwade, a second-year student from Fergusson College. “I hope we can learn ways of using this technology more responsibly.”

With inputs from Divyaja Kalyankar and Mansi Hake