I've spent a lot of time and energy talking about all the great ways that artificial intelligence can speed up teachers' workflow and provide unique learning experiences for students. But we are all very well aware that generative AI can also lead to academic dishonesty by creating "original" content that students (or even teachers) could pass off as their own. It is easy to catch plagiarism even without a plagiarism detection tool - just copy and paste a questioned sentence into Google with quotation marks around it and you will instantly see if those words were used by someone else. The "Check Plagiarism" feature in Google Classroom does this automatically and even compares student work to previously submitted work from within our district! But what about detecting AI? There is no clear-cut "proof" that AI was used to create content. Instead, we must use our instinct combined with some digital tools to come to a general conclusion. You're on your own for the instinct, but the Brisk Teaching Chrome extension provides two great tools that can support you in trying to detect generative AI.
These tools only work with Google Documents, but they can be used within the document or within Google Classroom. Once you have the extension installed, start out by having the document open in Docs or Classroom. Then click the Brisk Teaching icon.
In the menu, select "Inspect Writing."
You will then see a "video" of how the document was written:
As you can see, it provides you with the total number of edits, the time it took to write the work, and it highlights any large sections that were pasted into the document. Usually, when one does a work of writing, it takes time and includes a fair amount of rewriting or editing along the way. In this case, watching the entire thing come together in 16 minutes would be a red flag. The two large copy/pastes would be another red flag. The "Check Plagiarism" tool in Google Classroom did not flag any passages, so as a teacher, I might conclude that those copy/pastes came from AI.
The second part of the Inspect Writing tool is an AI detector. Once the video has run and provided you with all the information, you can go up to this teeny tiny little icon in the top right to access the AI Detector:
AI detectors are not perfect, and by themselves they are not enough to prove academic dishonesty. But in this case - instinct combined with the speed of writing (and lack of editing), large copy/paste blocks, and the "Highly Likely" possibility of AI generated content should be enough to warrant a conversation with the writer, administration, and guardian.
As generative AI becomes more prevalent in our world, it is vitally important for us to teach our students how to use it appropriately and to hold them accountable when they do not. Likewise, we should always ensure that we as educators are modeling ethical use of all technology. AI is a tool to support our work - not a replacement for human creativity and ingenuity.