Democracy Dies in Darkness

We tested a new ChatGPT-detector for teachers. It flagged an innocent student.

Five high school students helped our tech columnist test a ChatGPT detector coming from Turnitin to 2.1 million teachers. It missed enough to get someone in trouble.

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Lucy Goetz, a student at Concord High School in California helped tech columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler test Turnitin's AI detector. She was surprised to discover it erroneously flagged part of her original essay as created by AI. (Andria Lo for The Washington Post)
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High school senior Lucy Goetz got the highest possible grade on an original essay she wrote about socialism. So imagine her surprise when I told her that a new kind of educational software I’ve been testing claimed she got help from artificial intelligence.