This guide helps instructors understand what the AI Writing Report shows and how to read its results. It also explains key limitations so you can review reports confidently and consistently.
In this guide:
Turnitin's AI writing detection capability is designed to help educators identify text that might be prepared by a generative AI tool, such as large-language models, chatbots, word spinners, and bypasser tools.
Our AI writing detection model may not always be accurate (it may misidentify human-written, AI-generated, and AI-paraphrased text), 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 academic misconduct has occurred.
The percentage generated by Turnitin’s AI writing detection model is different from and independent of the similarity score. AI writing highlights are not visible in the Similarity Report.
The overall percentage detected as AI indicates the qualifying text (prose sentences contained in a long-form writing format) within the submitted document that Turnitin’s AI writing detection model determines could be generated by AI or could be generated by AI and could be further modified using an AI paraphraser tool or an AI bypasser tool.
The overall percentage of text detected as AI is detailed in two detection categories in the Submission Breakdown:
Please note that only our English AI detector includes AI paraphrasing and AI bypasser detection capabilities. At this time our Spanish and Japanese AI detectors do not include AI paraphrasing or AI bypasser detection capabilities.
Use the new submission breakdown bar for a visual overview of where an AI Large Language Model and AI-paraphrasing tools have been detected within the individual pages of a submission. The bar is interactive and allows you to select each color highlight to bring the corresponding text and page of the submission into focus.
The report may display one of the following potential states:
After processing, Turnitin's AI detection did not identify any qualifying text in the submission as likely generated by an AI writing and/or AI text altering tool.
Our testing has found that there is a higher incidence of false positives when the percentage is between 0 and 19. In order to reduce the likelihood of misinterpretation, the AI indicator will display an asterisk (*) for percentages between 0 and 20 to call attention to the fact that the score is less reliable.
The loading state indicates that the AI writing detection request is currently processing. Generating the report results can take several minutes.
This state means that Turnitin has failed to process the submission and the report cannot be opened. While Turnitin is constantly working to improve its service, events like this can occasionally occur. In this case, please try resubmitting the submission again. If this issue persists and the submission meets our file requirements , we recommend contacting your Turnitin administrator for more assistance.
The submission does not meet the file requirements needed to successfully process it for AI writing detection. Please review our File requirements for an AI Writing eport guide and try again.
The submission has been processed successfully. The percentage displayed at the top of the report indicates the amount of qualifying text within the submission that Turnitin’s AI writing detection has identified as likely AI-generated or likely AI-generated text, and then was modified by an AI paraphrase tool.
This submission was processed with an earlier version of the AI Writing Report. An updated version of the report now includes AI paraphrasing detection. To generate a new report with the enhanced detection capabilities, please resubmit the file.
At the time of the submission request, AI writing detection was disabled for your account. AI writing is now enabled for your account. Please resubmit the file to generate an AI Writing Report.
To avoid potential incidence of false positives, no score or highlights are attributed for AI detection scores above 0% and below the 20% threshold in the report. When this occurs, it is now indicated with an asterisk (*%) and no percentage is attributed.
This change is reflected in new submissions only and will not retroactively apply to existing submissions. If your report was generated before July 8, 2024, then you may still see a numerical score below 20%.
False positives (incorrectly flagging human-written text as AI-generated) are a possibility in AI models.
For a submission to generate an AI Writing Report and percentage, the submission needs to meet the following requirements:
Qualifying text (prose sentences contained in long-form writing format) means individual sentences contained in paragraphs that make up a longer piece of written work, such as an essay, a dissertation, or an article, etc. The model does not reliably detect AI-generated text in the form of non-prose, such as poetry, scripts, or code, nor does it detect short-form/unconventional writing such as bullet points, tables, or annotated bibliographies.
This means that a document containing several different writing types would result in a disparity between the percentage and the highlights.
How Turnitin has made this determination is complex. To help our users understand Turnitin’s method of detecting AI writing text, we have created an extensive FAQ. Learn more about Turnitin’s AI writing detection tool.
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