Turn it in...facepalm

This semester, I am helping co-facilitate a course somewhere new. More details of that in the future (maybe), but for the time being, I wanted to reflect a bit on technology use.  Since this is a new institution for me, I have to click on the technology acceptance pop-ups, see policy dialog boxes that I no longer see at my institution, and so on.  One of the assignments I am grading this term requires the use of TurnItIn, and while perusing through the course to familiarize myself with the course, I clicked on TII. Since I am new to this instance of TII, I got greeted with a disclaimer about AI detection (bolding my own):

Our AI writing assessment is designed to help educators identify text that might be prepared by a generative AI tool. Our AI writing assessment may not always be accurate (i.e., our AI models may produce either false positive results or false negative results), so it should not be used as the sole basis for adverse actions against a student. It takes further scrutiny and human judgment in conjunction with an organization's application of its specific academic policies to determine whether any academic misconduct has occurred

Alright, fine.  It's a fine disclaimer; there should be human judgment determining whether something breaks your academic code of conduct.  However, I was wondering what this thing flags.  So, since I have access to a previous semester's course shell, I popped in quickly to see what last year's student submissions were for this assignment to get a sense of what TII flags.  Pretty much all of the assignments were flagged with about 20% suspected AI use... Ooooohhhh kay....  I decided to have a closer look to see what was marked as AI.  Having used TII for stuff at my own institution, I know that their 'regular' plagiarism detector usually "detects" things that aren't really plagiarism...  Looking at the highlighted passages that are suspected to be generated by AI, I have absolutely no idea how any human would go through and determine if these passages were AI-generated. How does one determine if something is truly created by a synthetic text extruding machine? To accuse a student of academic dishonesty would require solid proof, and all TII does is sow the seeds of anxiety and doubt amongst faculty that students have cheated, with no way of being able to verify such claims.

So...I guess my takeaway is: Tell me you're marketing something that doesn't work without telling me you're marketing something that doesn't work...

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