Johns Hopkins University professor Taylor Hahn first noticed the issue when he got an alert while grading an international student’s paper, according to aProfessor Hahn has uploaded the student’s paper to the software tool, Turnitin, which is reportedly used by over 16,000 academic institutions across the world to find plagiarism — and more recently, to spot AI-generated text.
“This student, immediately, without prior notice that this was an AI concern, they showed me drafts, PDFs with highlighter over them,” Hahn recalled of his meeting with the student.In another instance, Hahn had worked directly with a non-native English speaking student on an outline and drafts for a paper, only to later find that Turnitin flagged the majority of the paper as generated by AI.
While the Stanford study did not involve Turnitin, it did find that seven other AI-detecting tools had flagged writing by non-native English speakers 61 percent of the time, with the incorrect assessment being unanimous on approximately 20 percent of the papers. One theory as to why this bias is occurring with AI detectors is the reality that these tools are typically programmed to flag content when the word choice is predictable and simple — a pattern that non-native English speakers are more likely to exhibit in their writing.