{"id":22871,"date":"2026-08-17T08:39:33","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T12:09:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.citl.mun.ca\/instructionalresources\/?p=22871"},"modified":"2026-08-17T08:49:57","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T12:19:57","slug":"issues-with-genai-detection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.citl.mun.ca\/instructionalresources\/issues-with-genai-detection\/","title":{"rendered":"Issues with GenAI Detection\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Generative AI works by predicting text based on a trained model and some context provided through&nbsp;input&nbsp;(e.g.&nbsp;prompts).&nbsp;The tools are designed to draw from the information on which they are trained, therefore it is&nbsp;virtually impossible&nbsp;to reliably distinguish the AI-generated text from that which might be written by a human author.&nbsp;Patterns and phrases that typically appear in AI-generated text may raise suspicion; however, these alone are not reliable evidence that the tools were&nbsp;actually used.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>AI detectors use statistical pattern recognition and machine learning classifiers to estimate the mathematical probability that a piece of writing was generated by a language model&nbsp;(Bassett et al., 2026).&nbsp;Many GenAI detection tools produce reports that note how much of a submission could be \u201cAI-Generated\u201d and may pinpoint sections of concern.&nbsp;However,&nbsp;it\u2019s&nbsp;the instructor\u2019s responsibility to discern what constitutes a violation of academic integrity within the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.mun.ca\/university-calendar\/school-of-graduate-studies\/school-of-graduate-studies\/4\/12\/#4.12.4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">academic misconduct policy.<\/a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Considerations before using&nbsp;GenAI&nbsp;detection tools&nbsp;<\/h2>\n<p>There are many tools available that&nbsp;attempt&nbsp;to detect GenAI use in writing (e.g.&nbsp;iThenticate,&nbsp;GPTZero,&nbsp;StrikePlagiarism).&nbsp;Companies like&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/gptzero.me\/educators\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">GPTZero<\/a>&nbsp;cite the limitations of their applications and encourage&nbsp;educators to&nbsp;use the system to&nbsp;\u201cflag situations in which a conversation can be started\u201d.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>These tools are not recommended for use in&nbsp;identifying&nbsp;academic misconduct due to the fundamental lack of reliability of such detection and other concerns,&nbsp;including:&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Evidence of Cultural Bias: research suggests that students whose native language is not English are often falsely accused of using Generative AI by such tools.&nbsp;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Infringement on student&nbsp;intellectual property (IP)&nbsp;rights:&nbsp;detection tools are commercial products that&nbsp;generally use&nbsp;submitted&nbsp;work to train their models;&nbsp;submitting&nbsp;student work without permission would be a violation of the student\u2019s IP rights.&nbsp;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Violation of privacy policies: sharing of student personal information with unauthorized outside agencies is not&nbsp;permitted&nbsp;under the university&#8217;s Privacy Policy.&nbsp;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Unclear Sources: because the content is generated, the tool cannot&nbsp;identify&nbsp;the originating source of the suspected content as hard evidence.&nbsp;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Reference:&nbsp;<\/h2>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list ref-list\">\n<li>Bassett, M. A., Bradshaw, W.,&nbsp;Bornsztejn, H., Hogg, A., Murdoch, K., Pearce, B., &amp; Webber, C. (2026). Heads we win, tails you lose: AI detectors in education.&nbsp;<em>Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management<\/em>, 1\u201316. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1080\/1360080X.2026.2622146&nbsp;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Generative AI works by predicting text based on a trained model and some context provided through&nbsp;input&nbsp;(e.g.&nbsp;prompts).&nbsp;The tools are designed to draw from the information on which they are trained, therefore it is&nbsp;virtually impossible&nbsp;to reliably distinguish the AI-generated text from that which might be written by a human author.&nbsp;Patterns and phrases that typically appear in AI-generated [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":255,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[225],"tags":[241,429,259,431,75,245,73],"collection":[],"class_list":["post-22871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-generative-ai","tag-academic-integrity","tag-academic-misconduct","tag-ai","tag-ai-detection","tag-course-syllabus","tag-regulations","tag-syllabus"],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"simon","author_link":"https:\/\/blog.citl.mun.ca\/instructionalresources\/author\/simon\/"},"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7y0Lp-5WT","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.citl.mun.ca\/instructionalresources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.citl.mun.ca\/instructionalresources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.citl.mun.ca\/instructionalresources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.citl.mun.ca\/instructionalresources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/255"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.citl.mun.ca\/instructionalresources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22871"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.citl.mun.ca\/instructionalresources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22871\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22887,"href":"https:\/\/blog.citl.mun.ca\/instructionalresources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22871\/revisions\/22887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.citl.mun.ca\/instructionalresources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.citl.mun.ca\/instructionalresources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.citl.mun.ca\/instructionalresources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22871"},{"taxonomy":"collection","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.citl.mun.ca\/instructionalresources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/collection?post=22871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}