The remarkable advancement of artificial intelligence has transformed various areas of our lives. In particular, AI's ability to produce human-like text or AI writing has raised concerns about academic honesty. Unlike the traditional form of plagiarism, AI tools can potentially take on the task of writing assignments, adding another layer of complexity to maintaining academic integrity.
As we move towards an age where AI detection capabilities have become crucial, one question looms large - Can an established Learning Management System like Blackboard detect AI writing?
This blog delves into the functionalities of Blackboard, its core anti-plagiarism utility - SafeAssign, and other integrated tools, such as Turnitin and CopyLeaks, to elucidate their capabilities and constraints in identifying AI-written content.
What is Blackboard?
Blackboard provides an online platform for faculty to deliver, manage, and engage with educational content, known as a Learning Management System (LMS). It allows educators to distribute a range of course materials such as lectures, readings, multimedia content, and more. With Blackboard, communication between instructors and students is streamlined through features like announcements, discussion boards, and direct emails.
A salient feature of Blackboard is its capacity to handle student submissions directly via the platform. Instructors can grade these assignments online, offering constructive feedback.
Students, on the other hand, can review their grades, peruse instructor feedback, and measure their performance. Considering the substantial use of resources and submissions available online, a significant hurdle that emerges is maintaining academic integrity. How does Blackboard handle this?
To comprehend its capability, it's crucial to understand what SafeAssign is, Blackboard’s core anti-plagiarism tool, and how it aids in detecting plagiarism and potentially, AI-written content.
Blackboard’s Anti-Plagiarism and Anti-Cheating Tools
Maintaining academic integrity is a crucial aspect of Blackboard's functionality. Students taking online exams or submitting assignments are subjected to stringent anti-cheating procedures. Beyond the typical anti-cheating measures, the unique features of Blackboard include
- Lockdown Browser: This browser restricts students from navigating to other websites while taking a test or quiz, reducing the possibility of finding answers elsewhere.
- Timed Assessments: Restricting the length of the examination also ensures that students complete tests without extensive periods for searching for answers.
- Randomization of Test Questions: A useful strategy to discourage answer swapping among students. The questions or even the answers can be shuffled, ensuring each student receives a unique set of questions.
- Integration with Test Proctoring Software: Third-party proctoring software can be linked with Blackboard to monitor unusual behavior during tests hinting at potential cheating.
To counter plagiarism, Blackboard offers an integrated tool known as SafeAssign. SafeAssign compares student submissions against a vast database of varied sources. Following the scanning course, an originality report indicating the share of matching text is generated, thus enabling easy detection of potential plagiarism.
The underlying question remains - Can these tools detect AI-written content? The answer is not as straightforward as one might think.
Also Read: Does SafeAssign Detect ChatGPT Chatbots? Answered
Can Blackboard Detect AI Writing?
While Blackboard's anti-cheating and anti-plagiarism tools are robust, measuring their functionality in the face of AI-generated content poses a challenge. Why is this the case?
Primarily, SafeAssign and other such plagiarism detection tools rely on text-matching algorithms to identify plagiarism. The submitted text is contrasted with various databases to spot overlaps or similar phrases. If a student assembles a paraphrased copy of the original content or idea in their writing, it’s challenging to detect a match.
However, AI-generated content can create original, non-plagiarized content, posing a different challenge altogether. Sophisticated AI models have the potential to mimic a student's writing style. The original AI-crafted content could escape the nets of plagiarism detection tools, obtaining an outstanding originality score.
Also Read: Copyleaks AI Detector Review
Can SafeAssign Detect AI-Generated Content?
As mentioned previously, the mechanics of SafeAssign lean primarily towards identifying direct plagiarism, causing it to stumble when it comes to AI-generated writing. By virtue of how Artificial Intelligence operates, AI writing tools form unique, original sentences that do not fall squarely into the category of plagiarism detected by SafeAssign.
When a machine like ChatGPT generates text, it doesn’t directly copy-paste from existing content but crafts something unique, making it difficult for SafeAssign to identify a direct match in its database. This is due to the already generated text being original in technicality.
How does Blackboard’s SafeAssign detect unusual Patterns?
SafeAssign employs a two-fold strategy to detect plagiarism. It first runs the submitted content against a comprehensive database consisting of an enormous collection of academic essays, billions of website pages, and the institution’s own arsenal of previously submitted student papers. Following the scanning, SafeAssign generates an originality report that displays an "Originality Score," a measure of how much of the written document overlaps with existing sources.
The report also provides comprehensive details concerning each matching instance found, including the exact sentence or phrase and the corresponding source from the database. The wait for the report typically spans a few minutes, though it might take longer for extensive papers or if multiple assignments are queued for checking.
Blackboard’s Limitations in Detecting AI-Written Content
Although Blackboard's SafeAssign provides a potent check on conventional plagiarism, AI-written content poses a significant challenge. Trouble spots include a limited focus on text matching, the ability of AI to craft original content, the capacity of advanced AI models to mimic students' writing styles, SafeAssign only scratching the surface, and its dependency on the size and comprehensiveness of its databases.
Limited Focus on Text Matching
SafeAssign, a plagiarism detection tool like many others, primarily matches text for similarities. While effective in identifying exact matches with known sources, this method has limitations. AI writing, powered by advanced machine learning algorithms, creates unique content that may differ in wording and structure from existing sources. Trained on extensive data sets, AI models produce sentences that are conceptually similar but uniquely formulated. This can lead to AI-generated content detection by tools like SafeAssign that focus on direct text and phrase matching.
Original AI-Crafted Content
A core strength of AI and ML tools is their ability to generate original content. While a human writer might unconsciously mimic phrases from their reading, an AI model generates sentences based on patterns and structures it has learned. The result is a piece of content that, while similar to existing texts in topic or sentiment, may not match any existing document at the phrase level.
This poses a significant challenge for text-matching tools like SafeAssign. These tools, by design, are looking for direct copying of phrases or passages—essentially, recycling of existing content. However, since AI models can create entirely new sentences that are not directly copied from any source, they can produce work that looks like original content to these tools, even if the ideas or themes are borrowed.
Mimic a Student’s Writing Style
Advanced AI models show an uncanny ability to mimic a student’s writing style, adding another layer of complexity for plagiarism-detecting tools. These AI models can generate text that maintains the writer's general voice, tone, and diction, making it highly challenging for tools like SafeAssign to distinguish between human-written and AI-generated text.
To an algorithm searching for matching phrases, a well-executed piece of AI writing can seem indistinguishable from a document written by the person who trained the model. This presents additional challenges in identifying AI-generated text. Despite these hurdles, developments in AI explanation and detection are actively ongoing, laying the foundation for more advanced detection systems in the future.
Best Practices To Avoid Plagiarism on Blackboard
While leveraging AI writing tools might appear to be an easy way out for students set on bypassing plagiarism checks, it does a disservice to their learning journey. Here are several best practices that students can follow to maintain academic integrity:
Understand What Plagiarism Is: It goes beyond identical copying of texts. Using ideas, concepts, imagery, or paraphrasing without giving due credit equates to plagiarism.
Learn Proper Citation Methods: Keeping in line with their institution’s prescribed style guide (APA, MLA, Chicago), students should learn to correct citing procedures.
Always Cite Sources: It is better to overly cite than under-cite. Irrespective of the source type – books, journals, websites, or videos, include them in your citations.
Write In Your Own Words: Comprehend the material sufficiently to be able to express it in your own words. More than merely substituting a word here and there is required.
Provide a Balanced View: Include a healthy mix of your thoughts, analyses, reputable quotes, and cited sources in your work. Don’t lean too heavily on any one aspect.
Various writing tools can assist in creating original work. Students are advised to harness these resources for idea generation and reinforcing their argumentation rather than using them to hand over the entire writing process.
Copyleaks Integration with Blackboard
In addressing the concern of whether Blackboard can detect AI, one cannot ignore the valuable role of Copyleaks. Copyleaks is an innovative plagiarism detection platform capable of identifying plagiarism, paraphrased content, and, most importantly, AI-generated content. This compatibility with AI detection lends a significant edge to its capability.
A noteworthy aspect of Copyleaks's efficiency is its integration with Learning Management Systems like Blackboard. This integration, which can be implemented swiftly without any coding requirements, empowers educators with Copyleaks's robust AI-detection capabilities via their Blackboard dashboard.
Best Practices to Prevent AI Writing Misuse
While AI writing tools are an asset, their potential misapplication in academic settings necessitates the following best practices to prevent their misuse:
Set Clear Guidelines: Institutions should make it clear to students that assignments should be their own work and not the product of AI tools.
Promote Original Writing: Encourage students to express their understanding and thought processes in their own words rather than relying on AI to generate content.
Build a Culture of Honesty: Create an atmosphere where academic honesty is valued and rewarded.
Educate Students on AI Tools: Instead of outright banning AI, integrate it into teaching students about new technologies.
Ethical Implications of Using AI with Blackboard
Today's rapid AI developments are revolutionizing education, especially online learning. However, the rampant usage of AI could compromise the integrity of student work. AI's efficacy in generating human-like text raises questions about its ethical implications. Modern plagiarism detection tools need to evolve to keep pace with advancements in AI-generated content. The primary areas of concern involve:
- Knocking off Learning Opportunities: The use of AI-generated content can deprive students of valuable learning opportunities as they resort to proprietary automated writing technologies like ChatGPT to generate their assignment answers.
- University policies on AI: Universities need to formulate policies that clarify the acceptable use of AI in academic activities.
- Falsely inflating grades: The use of AI can artificially inflate grades, creating a skewed picture of a student's true capabilities.
Use Scalenut AI Content Detector and Humanizer
Alt text: Sample ChatGPT text spotted as AI generated by Scalenut Content detector
While Blackboard has several integrations to help maintain academic integrity, Scalenut AI Content Detector and Humanizer is another tool that's extremely effective in detecting AI-generated text.
Scalenut uses deep learning and language understanding models to detect AI in text. It’s specifically designed to catch AI-written content, as it examines the patterns and structures usually associated with machine-generated text, offering a comprehensive review of potential AI-written content.
Scalenut is fairly easy to use. You don’t need to sign up for your free account here. Copy and paste the text in the box and click on ‘Scan for AI content’. The impressive aspect of this tool is its flexibility in handling enormous lengths of text. Once you have detected the content, you can use the Rewrite & Humanize features to humanize AI texts completely. The tool offers unlimited scans with high precision.
Try Scalenut AI Content Detector and Humanizer now!
Conclusion
AI tools and writing aids have positively revolutionized the process of content formulation. However, in academic circles, their use, particularly for assignment submissions, presents several challenges. Safeguarding academic integrity in this AI-dominated landscape falls onto the shoulders of learning management systems like Blackboard. Currently, plagiarism detection tools such as SafeAssign and Turnitin do have certain limitations when it comes to accurately detecting AI-written assignments. Still, future developments, enhancements, and integrations may hold promising solutions to this contemporary challenge.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can AI writing be easily detected by plagiarism checkers?
Presently, conventional plagiarism checkers like SafeAssign may struggle to detect AI-written text, as AI does not typically plagiarize existing sources but generates original content.
How can we discourage students from using AI writing for academic tasks?
Educational institutions can establish clear guidelines and policies about the use of AI. Also, promoting the culture of original writing and academic honesty can aid in discouraging AI usage for assignments.
Is it ethical to use AI writing for certain academic projects?
Appropriate usage of AI to enhance learning outcomes, foster creativity, or complement research is ethical; misuse, such as for entire assignments, infringes upon academic integrity.
What measures can institutions employ to address the issue of AI-generated content?
Educational institutions can integrate advanced AI detection tools like Copyleaks with LMS and draft policies that clearly define the permitted usage of AI writing tools in academic assignments.
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