Resources for Detecting Plagiarism & Artificial Intelligence (AI)
A specifically designed Turnitin.com Drop Box can be placed in any Brightspace course for students to submit their papers. An Originality Report will be generated for each submission, the result of comparison between the text of the submission against the search targets including billions of pages of active and archived Internet information, a repository of works previously submitted to Turnitin, and a repository of tens of thousands of periodicals, journals, and publications. The sources for the latter include AcademicOne File, Emerald, ABC-Clio, Sage e-Reference, and CrossRef.
Many faculty members are currently using it as a help in editing papers. Faculty are registering their classes, setting up assignments and giving students time to submit drafts of their papers. Students then have an opportunity to redo their papers before submitting them to their professors at the final due date. This is a powerful demonstration to students that faculty do indeed care about the quality of their papers and the students' credibility.
Faculty may submit single individual papers to Turnitin without using a Brightspace interface. For further assistance with Turnitin, please contact Brian Snapp at 570-941-4040 or Aileen McHale at 570-941-4365.
Turnitin Enabled Dropbox Quickstart
For more information about Turnitin, go to their Web site: https://turnitin.com
What is AI?
AI is a field of computer science that focuses on developing intelligent machines with human-like thoughts and behaviors. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has now been used in a wide range of applications, from self-driving vehicles to credit card fraud detection and medical notetaking. AI excels at repetitive, detailed-orientated tasks, and this technology has grown in its capacity to reason, self-correct, and learn. Over the past decade, AI reliance has become increasingly prevalent with the integration of AI into everyday tasks. Some common functions include text-prediction, language translation, text summation, and content generation. Other common capabilities include generating code or creating artwork.
AI functionality continuously develops with each model demonstrating more human-like behavior than the last. It has also become more immediately accessible to students with programs like ChatGPT 3.5 requiring nothing more than a user ID and password. With these advancements, professionals in higher education must consider how to adapt their pedagogy and perspectives on academic integrity so that they may continue providing students with a high-quality education.
Risks of AI Usage
AI dependency is the greatest risk posed by AI as it continuously enters new contexts within our daily lives. If one becomes overly reliant on AI by using it as a substitute for daily tasks, rather than an assistant in completing those tasks, it limits an individual’s opportunity to practice and develop certain skills. For example, if you become accustomed to using AI to answer your emails, you may not be able to respond as efficiently and effectively without the tool over time. However, there are also several risks associated with using content generated from AI:
- Responses are limited: While disciplines depend upon empirical research to expand knowledge, AI uses a body of pre-existing text to combine ideas or generate ideas, but it does not have the capacity for original thought, so it cannot create new knowledge in the same way. AI may appear to be capable of original thought, but it merely combines preexisting information or uses statistical information or rule-based systems to present new content from previous data. Moreover, AI can usually only access text back to a certain date. For example, ChatGPT can only access information prior to 2021, when it was trained, so it cannot respond to current events accurately. Likewise, Chatbots lack the capacity to truly think at the same caliber as humans, though they may sound convincingly human in their responses. For this reason, AI responds more accurately to surface-level questions with objectively correct responses. More subjective questions may result in unpredictable or less accurate responses.
- Responses must always be corroborated with additional sources: There are documented instances where AI “hallucinated” or fabricated answers that it could not generate. The danger is that the responses are presented in an elevated mannerism with extensive explanation and those unknowledgeable about the subject may be misled. Similarly, AI that has been trained on biased content, like texts from the internet, will reproduce the bias in their responses, spreading societal divides.
- Responses may plagiarize or use data unethically. Remember, the information that you enter into an AI platform may be used to train future AI, so it’s crucial that you do not input copyrighted material or your own original work. It is also not clear what data was used to train some AI platforms, and previously, some AI used copyrighted materials without the correct permissions. There is even a case where AI was trained from private medical records.
Explore AI Tools
The best way to educate the next generation of professionals who will use AI in their daily life is to educate yourself on its capacity and functionality. It is important for educators to see how AI may enhance a student’s learning experience.
Please note: The resources listed on this page are for informational purposes only and do not reflect any official University of Scranton endorsement or policy on the use of AI tools.
Artificial Intelligence in Teaching and Learning (Boston College Center for Teaching Excellence)
For Faculty: Working with AI (Carleton College)
AI Resources (Bowling Green State University)
Syllabus Guidelines for Generative AI (UNC, School of Global Public Health)
Possible AI Syllabus Statements (Brandeis, Center for Teaching & Learning)