Join any of Reddit’s academic communities or Discord channels, and you’ll quickly stumble upon countless threads filled with frustrated posts about AI detection and discussions like ‘Can Turnitin Detect ChatGPT?’ Here you’ll find PhD candidates desperately seeking advice for flagged dissertations, undergrads panicking about failed assignments, and faculty members admitting they’re not sure how much weight to give these Turnitin AI detection results.
This article isn’t just another voice among those complaints or an answer to “Can ChatGPT be traced in my writing and how to avoid it”. Instead of focusing on avoidance, we examine how Turnitin’s AI detection actually works, explore its limitations, and understand what to do when your legitimate work gets flagged as AI-generated. The goal isn’t to dismiss Turnitin, but to learn to interpret its results and respond effectively when things go wrong.
To put it simply, yes! As per its website, AI-generated content from tools like ChatGPT can be traced by Turnitin’s AI Detection Tool, which scans your text for repetitive structures, the use of specific vocabulary, and unnatural phrasing as compared to human writing. The AI detection software also compares your work against databases of known AI-generated content to spot similarities.
Fully integrated into the new Similarity Check Report, Turnitin’s AI Writing Report includes a score between 0% and 100% that indicates the likelihood of AI being involved in writing your text.
When Turnitin finds potential AI content, it highlights the suspicious sections in the detection report so you can see exactly which parts of your document triggered the system.
Turnitin offers color-coded results and a score to indicate AI-generated writing. Source: Turnitin
Initially, Turnitin’s AI detection software was trained to identify text generated by large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and related variants. This allowed it to catch outputs from AI writing tools built on these models, which means text generated by ChatGPT can be traced. Since then, Turnitin has broadened its AI detection tool to cover GPT-4 (including ChatGPT Plus), GPT-4o, Google’s Gemini (Pro), Meta’s LLaMA, and other AI tools powered by similar LLMs. Now that tools like ChatGPT show up on Turnitin, the company has said it plans to continue expanding support to cover more AI models over time.
Often, in an effort to avoid being flagged by AI detectors, students and researchers turn to AI paraphrasing tools to modify content generated by large language models like ChatGPT. This shortcut has raised concerns about academic integrity, especially among educators, who believe that by relying too much on automation, students may miss out on developing their analytical thinking, writing and communication skills.
Turnitin addresses this issue by catching AI text even when it’s been rewritten or reworded by AI tools, which means that Turnitin can detect ChatGPT if you paraphrase. Part of the English AI detection model, its AI paraphrasing detection feature identifies text paraphrased by AI text spinners and flags it as “AI-generated text that was AI-paraphrased”. Both AI-written and AI paraphrased text are highlighted in different colours in the AI writing report, along with a percentage breakdown.
When you run a paper through Turnitin’s AI detection tool, it divides the text into smaller segments and analyzes each one for patterns of AI-generated content. Turnitin mainly scans what it calls “qualifying text”, which includes prose sentences organized in paragraphs, like you’d find in essays and dissertations. This means the tool skips over content formatted as code blocks, bullet points, or tables when scanning for AI patterns.
After analyzing all the qualifying segments, Turnitin calculates an overall percentage representing the percentage of your submission that appears to be generated by AI tools like ChatGPT.
Here’s how to read Turnitin’s AI detection report:
Turnitin developed its AI detection tool as an extension of its widely used and acclaimed plagiarism checker, which has helped it quickly earn the trust of universities and institutions. If you’ve used Turnitin before, you’ll notice that the “AI score” closely mirrors the similarity score from Turnitin’s plagiarism checker.
Here’s where things get tricky – The design of Turnitin’s AI detector closely mirrors the plagiarism detector, which may mislead users into thinking the process works the same way. But this is far from the truth – AI detection is not the same as plagiarism checks!
Turnitin’s plagiarism checker flags sentences that match other sources and provides a direct link back to the original text, which instructors can review in order to make informed decisions. However, in the case of AI detection, there’s no original text to link back to. Users of the AI detection tool must simply trust Turnitin’s algorithm and make the decision.
So how reliable is Turnitin’s AI detection? Let’s explore further.
Turnitin is widely used in academia as an AI detector for ChatGPT-generated text, but its reliability is questionable. Based on feedback from real users, here’s why Turnitin’s AI detection shouldn’t be used as the sole proof for academic misconduct:
Turnitin can detect ChatGPT outputs by scanning your writing for predictable text patterns and variations in sentence length and complexity, similar to other AI detection tools. Since human-written text tends to be varied, mixing simple and complex structures, Turnitin uses this baseline to flag AI-generated content that doesn’t sound human.
The problem here is that academic writing is structured and follows certain patterns. Specific characteristics in doctoral research writing could be seen as too uniform to be human-written. This includes:
This detection method limits Turnitin’s ability to distinguish between authentic academic writing and AI-generated content. Even when written entirely by humans, your content may still be flagged as AI-generated.
AI detection’s pattern matching based on probability creates an unacceptable risk of false accusations in an academic context. It’s amusing that Turnitin sometimes flags human-authored papers as AI-generated, including texts written years before AI tools even existed. A report claims that non-native English speakers and writers face a higher risk of their content being incorrectly flagged as AI-authored.
Even unsubstantiated accusations can damage reputations in small academic communities. Graduate school applications, job searches, research funding, and professional references can all be affected by misconduct investigations, even when ultimately cleared. The stress and time lost defending against false accusations can derail research progress and academic timelines.
When students heavily paraphrase ChatGPT content or mix AI and human writing, Turnitin’s detection of ChatGPT becomes much less accurate, and it is more likely to miss AI-generated portions of the text. As per a study by Temple University, Turnitin scores for hybrid text (mix of human-written and AI text) are highly inaccurate, and the study found there was no correlation between what Turnitin flagged as AI-written and what was actually AI-written.
Turnitin’s summative AI detection scores can be a good starting point in conversations on AI use and academic integrity. However, Turnitin AI detection scores should not be used as standalone proof of misconduct. It’s recommended that educators ideally talk to the student being reviewed, consider the work they’ve put in, and gather contextual information in order to make the right decisions.
If your text is detected as AI-generated, especially when you know the original idea and writing were yours, it’s important not to lose heart. As academics, your sophisticated writing style, complex arguments, and technical language can easily trigger false positives in Turnitin’s AI detection system.
Most AI detectors have a high rate of false positives, and it can be incredibly frustrating when original work gets incorrectly flagged. AI detection tools are estimated to have errors in the range of 9%. There are also known cases where the US Constitution was flagged as AI-written.
Taking AI detection’s limitations into concern, universities, like Vanderbilt, are advising faculty against the use of AI detection tools, and Open AI withdrew their AI detection tool because of “low rates of accuracy.”
If your document is incorrectly flagged as AI-detected, you can take several measures:
Provide any handwritten drafts, outlines, or notes you made during research and writing. If you’ve used AI, share AI chat history links, take screenshots, or provide Google Docs/Microsoft Word version history with your supervisor to show the document’s development over time.
If you’ve used AI research assistants like Paperpal during your writing process, your digital footprint can be invaluable.
AI can save a lot of time in research, especially when you’re starting a new project or racing to meet a deadline. But there’s a catch: once you’ve been working on a draft for days or weeks, it’s easy to lose track of which parts are yours and which came from the AI. And with originality at the heart of academic writing, that’s a risk no scholar can afford to take.
That’s where Paperpal’s AI Footprint shines, by helping you see exactly where Paperpal’s AI has contributed.
The best part? It tracks AI contributions in real time, so you can fix it at any point in the writing process, not just at the end! With Paperpal’s AI Footprint:
You can also export your search history from the Research feature, which maintains a record of your specific research queries. Document papers you’ve accessed, check for papers saved in the citation library, and validate them with your final reference list. This creates a clear trail from initial research to submission.
The strength of using credible AI research tools like Paperpal is its verified source integrity. Paperpal’s database of 250 million scholarly articles is sourced from leading research repositories, making every accessible source credible.
Run your work through Paperpal’s AI Review feature to assess text readability and logical flow. Based on your prompts, AI Review can provide detailed feedback with suggestions for improvement; this can also help you understand exactly why certain sections might sound too mechanical or formulaic.
Pay attention to overly structured passages without clear reasoning and use these insights to combine your research expertise and anecdotes. These elements are impossible for AI to replicate, making your work distinctly yours.
When working with AI-assisted writing, running your manuscript through plagiarism detection software before submission acts as a preventative measure against potential AI detection problems.
AI learns from millions of existing texts, so it can accidentally reproduce phrases or sentence structures from published works without you realizing it. When you submit your paper, plagiarism checkers will flag these similarities, and journals often interpret high similarity scores as evidence of AI use, even though your ideas are original.
The tricky part is that what looks completely original to you might contain accidentally “borrowed” phrases that plagiarism software recognizes from its database. By running your work through plagiarism detection before submission, you can catch and fix these unintentional similarities, avoiding the suspicion that comes with high plagiarism scores and preventing journals from questioning whether you used AI assistance.
Ask for your case to be reviewed by a human editor, rather than being judged solely by Turnitin’s output. This may likely lead to not being judged for academic misconduct.
As the use of AI becomes more common in academia, students and researchers are more focused on “how do I avoid getting flagged?” instead of “how do I write a better paper?”. AI writing tools are everywhere, and honestly, it’s getting harder to tell the difference between genuinely good academic work and AI-generated content.
While AI tools are invaluable in research, we must use them ethically and always prioritize original research and authentic intellectual contribution. The goal shouldn’t be fooling detection systems; it should be using AI to enhance our ability to communicate groundbreaking ideas and rigorous scholarship.
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