AI checkers for teachers are the topic of our blog post today!
AI generated content is now everywhere online. The infamous ChatGPT is but the tip of the iceberg. In fact, AI content generation tools have been around for several months before the introduction of ChatGPT.
Like any other technology, when abused or used inappropriately, these AI tools can turn into a devastating technology, harming content creators and promoting a culture of plagiarism, inauthenticity, and amateurism.
If you are an educator or a teacher, you probably are already dealing with the repercussions of these AI tools in your daily work. More and more students are using AI to help them with their learning and we can not stop them from doing that. But we can not accept that they turn in essays and assignments entirely written by AI.
If you are facing this predicament in class, the best way to deal with it is through repurposing your assessment methods to focus more on in-class quizzes, oral presentations, and hands-on projects. Besides reducing the reliance on AI-generated content, these tools also encourage deeper understanding and critical thinking.
There are also a wide range of tools and AI checkers that can help you detect AI-generated content. Please bear in mind that these tools are not perfect and sometimes they miss the mark. You need to use them with prudence.
As a teacher you already know your students and their scholarly abilities and you are a better judge of their work. Trust your instincts and observations when evaluating assignments, and use AI checkers as just one part of a broader strategy. Combining technology with your expertise allows you to better identify inconsistencies and guide your students toward authentic learning.
Best AI Checkers for Teachers
There are several AI checkers out there, I have tested a number of these tools and came up with this list.
In a post titled “Important Tips on How to Identify AI-generated Content in Student Assignments,” I argued that one of the key ways to detect AI-generated writing is through your own familiarity with both the student’s writing style and AI’s language patterns. By regularly interacting with AI, you can quickly identify formulaic structures, verbosity, or unnatural language. Examples of stylistic elements to pay attention to include the overuse of passive voice, repetition, and generic statements, as well as syntactic and orthographic perfection which often lacks a human touch.
1. Copyleaks
Copyleaks is an excellent AI content detection and plagiarism checker tool. It makes use of advanced algorithms to detect whether content (e.g., essays, blog posts, news articles, books, posts on social media, etc) has been written by a human or generated by an AI writing tool such as ChatGPT or Jasper.
Copyleaks supports various languages including English, French, Spanish, German, and Portuguese. The way it work is simple: copy the text you want to scan, head over to copyleaks.com and paste it in the box then click check. You will get the results within seconds.
Copyleaks also has a handy Chrome extension that enables you to instantly scan content on webpages to detect whether content is written by human, text bots, or a combination of both. Copyleaks offers over 1000 credits for free to test the tool (each credit covers around 250 words of scanned content).
Once your free credits are used up you will need to upgrade to get more credits. As of writing these lines, Copyleaks subscription costs $8.33/month (billed annually) or $9.99/month (billed monthly).
2. Content at Scale
Content at Scale is another powerful AI content detection tool. It uses advanced natural language processing models to detect AI generated content. Simply type your text or paste it into the text area and hit Check for AI Content. Within seconds you get a human content score that predicts the possibility of your content being fully human written, partially human written, or fully AI generated. You can paste whole articles and essays into the detector. Up to 25.000 characters are supported at a time. Content at Scale is free.
3. Crossplag
Crossplag is another good AI content detection tool. It too uses a combination of machine learning algorithms together with language processing techniques to detect AI writing. To start using Crossplag, you need to create an account. Next, paste your text in the text box, and Crossplag detector provides a rating score. The higher the score the more likely the content to be AI generated.
4. AI Writing Check
AI Writing Check is developed by Quill.org and CommonLit.org to help teachers check for AI writing in students assignments. Its developers provide an estimate of 80-90% accuracy of the tool.
You can check texts consisting of up to 400 words and for longer texts you need to add them into different sections. AI Writing Check is free to use. There is also an accompanying toolkit created by Quill and CommonLit on AI plagiarism which you can use with students in class.
5. The AI Text Classifier
AI Text Classifier is an AI content detector created by OpenAI for detecting AI writing. Here is what its developers said about the tool ‘s accuracy: “Classifier isn’t always accurate; it can mislabel both AI-generated and human-written text.
“They furner warned that “the Classifier is likely to get things wrong on text written by children and on text not in English, because it was primarily trained on English content written by adults.” Text Classifier is free of charge but you need to log in using your own OpenAI account to use it.
6. GPTZero
GPTZero is an AI content detector that claims to be built for educators. I tested it and found it way better than AI text Classifier.You can either type in or paste your text (minimu 250 characters) or you can upload files (formats supported are PDF, docx, txt) to scan for AI content. You can even upload multiple files at once which is ideal for use for the entire classroom. While GOTZero is free, it does require you to register to use it.
Final thoughts
While AI tools like ChatGPT offer exciting possibilities for enriched learning experiences, they also pose significant challenges, particularly around plagiarism and content originality. In my experience testing various AI content detectors, none are 100% accurate but they do serve as valuable aids for maintaining academic integrity. As educators, it’s crucial that we adapt to these emerging technologies, using them judiciously to both leverage their benefits and mitigate their drawbacks.
