How AI Detection Tools Are Changing the Fight Against Plagiarism

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AI tools have made content creation more accessible, but they’ve also raised concerns about originality and academic integrity. As a result, educators and publishers may increasingly be turning to AI detectors. Professors, scientific publications and website editors may be forced to take new measures to curb the growing concerns about plagiarism, particularly with the rise of generative AI tools. One of the most important steps that they have to take may be using AI detectors.

AI Could be Driving a New Plagiarism Epidemic and AI Detectors May be a Way to Combat It

Artificial intelligence did not invent plagiarism. The term “plagiarism” was first used in 1601, but people were probably plagiarizing content long before that. 

Although plagiarism has been occurring long before the popularity of generative AI, new advances in AI may be making it easier than ever. Unfortunately, many people who are using AI may not even realize that they are committing plagiarism. However, generative AI tools may create plagiarized content.

It is becoming harder and harder to stop the growing amount of plagiarism that is being created with AI. The good news is that AI detectors might be able to help fight this problem.

What is an AI detector? It is a software program that is designed to tell if content is made with AI technology or not. These programs are trained on hundreds or thousands of documents. Some of the documents in their data sets were made with AI and others were created by people. AI detectors use machine learning algorithms to try and tell the difference between AI-generated and human-written content.

Here are some of the things that they may look for:

• They have identified many common phrases and words that are frequently used by generative AI tools. They are more likely to flag content as being written by AI if these words or phrases are frequently used.
• They are aware that AI doesn't usually make spelling or grammatical errors. They may be more likely to flag content as being made with AI if there aren't any mistakes.
• They look to see if there are unique ideas or concepts in the content. Generative AI tools create content based on documents that they have reviewed and been trained on. If they don't encounter anything new, such as sources, statistics or alternative points of view, then they are more likely to believe that the content was made with AI.
• They look at the structure of the content to see if it is uniform. Documents that are made with AI tend to have sentences of similar lengths and similarly structured paragraphs throughout the document. They may be more likely to flag content as being made with AI if it seems extremely consistent.

There are a lot of AI detectors that may be able to help with this. One of the newest is AIDetector, which may detect both textual and visual content made with AI. The following table shows some other common AI detection tools.

Note: Features and performance may vary by app and user. 

AI detectors are not perfect, but they have become very effective at determining if content is made with AI or not. Some tools claim high accuracy rates (up to 99%) in identifying AI-generated content, though performance can vary based on content and context.

Why Don’t Editors or Professors Just Use Plagiarism Detectors Instead?

Plagiarism detectors have been around far longer than AI detectors. Some people who are concerned with fighting plagiarism might wonder why they shouldn't just use plagiarism detectors themselves. It is a good idea to use both. AI detectors use various signals to estimate whether content was likely generated by AI. These indicators may include:

• Plagiarism detectors may only be able to tell if content was plagiarized by scanning the open Internet or documents within their own data sets. Generative AI tools may have plagiarized content that plagiarism detectors do not have access to.
• Some ethicists and educators argue that submitting AI-generated content without disclosure may violate academic integrity guidelines, even if the content isn’t copied directly. It may also include passing off content that you didn't make as your own. Therefore, content made with AI may fall under the definition of plagiarism.
• Plagiarism detectors are not close to perfect at determining if content is plagiarized or not. They typically can only tell if the content was outright copied. People can use generative AI to reword content to bypass detection, but it is still going to be classified as plagiarism if it doesn't involve any of their own ideas.

For those concerned about originality, using both plagiarism and AI detectors may offer a more comprehensive approach. This may make it easier to protect academic and creative integrity. 

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