How to cheat turnitin.com

Here we go. This is a question that can easily be responded to by some students with "Use ChatGPT or any equivalent". I have had students come to me positively giddy with glee and singing the praises of these auto writing programs. By using the AI properly and feeding it proper information, all they have to do is take about 30 minutes to 3 hours to insert the correct quotes and revise the repetitive text that often occurs in the program. The result? An originally written paper that cannot be detected by any plagiarism software as having been AI written.

While turnitin claims that they are on it and their system will be able to to detect AI papers soon, the reality is that they will not be able to do that because the students themselves know exactly how to use the AI produced papers. They know those are only model papers that need to be improved upon and perfected so that those papers can be submitted for a grade. Never once needing to worry about plagiarism checkers. For now, the students are 20 steps ahead of turnitin and similar businesses. Could AI writing actually spell the end of plagiarism checkers in a way? Hmmm. That might actually be the case if students keep learning how to write their own papers in the process of using the AI writing systems.

Oh, the students who come to me with their AI written papers? I do not dissuade them from using the program. It teaches them a valuable writing lesson after all. Why should I contradict their desire to write their own papers? It helps them with their subject / topic learning process. I have long evolved my business from being an academic writer and researcher anyway. It is of no loss to me, but it is currently a loss for turnitin.com

How, exactly, are students "learning how to write their own papers" by just typing their assigned essay topics into an AI program? Writing your own paper means, as an absolute minimum, understanding the course material well enough to come up with a workable original thesis and an outline to develop that thesis, finding and organizing source material to support every substantive section of the outline, and then organizing your thoughts into logically ordered paragraphs of grammatically correct and well-punctuated topic sentences expressing specific points of argument relating to the topic sentence. That's the very least of what "learning how to write" papers means. How do you suppose someone can learn how to do any of that by just typing an an assigned essay topic and specs into an AI program so that the program can spit out an essay?


What would be just one example of a "valuable writing lesson" learned through the use of AI instead of actually writing an essay? If the name of the course is "AI Writing Programs for Non-Writers," then I suppose it's perfectly fine to practice writing using AI programs; but how is using AI instead of doing your own writing in other courses any better or different from paying someone else to write the same essay? What difference does it make whether students are typing the essay topic and assigned specs into an AI program or into an email sent to a human writer? What do you suppose college professors say when their students ask them if it's "OK" to use ChatGPT to write the essays assigned by those professors? Do you think that any History or Sociology, or Psychology or English Composition professors believe their students are "learning how to write their own papers" by using AI programs?