For many, the immediate response to ChatGPT’s 2022 rollout was to spend money and time developing plagiarism checkers to detect the presence of GenAI writing. Now, at the start of the 2024 fall semester, any simple Google search yields countless articles with titles like “The 14 Best Plagiarism Checkers to Detect ChatGPT-Generated Content” and “How to Detect AI Plagiarism: ChatGPT Checkers to Try and Avoid.” Turnitin launched an updated version of their AI-detection software in April, 2024 which boasts “up to 98% accuracy” in detecting AI-assisted content in student work. (I invite you to pay special attention to that “up to” part of the accuracy claim.)

Despite increasing accuracy, these software, including Turnitin, continue to falsely detect the presence of AI-generated content. While the data on the 2024 Turnitin model is slow to come out, it is important to note that plagiarism checkers often disproportionately flag the work of non-native English speakers relative to their English-speaking counterparts. Regardless of their accuracy, these detectors likely contribute to an uneasy tension between teacher and student. In their 2024 study, Jiahui Luo finds that students are increasingly fearful and mistrustful of their instructors “in the age of GenAI.”

The solution: DON’T SUBMIT STUDENT WORK TO GEN-AI DETECTION SOFTWARE. We waste valuable time and energy worrying over the likelihood of a false positive, and we run the risk of cultivating a toxic culture of mistrust in our classrooms. Yet there is another very basic reason for resisting use of Gen-AI checkers: the presence of some Gen-AI assisted writing does not indicate the lack of creative, critical, original human thought. Researchers in a variety of academic fields have started integrating the tool into their work, and universities are starting to outline policies and principles of how and when to allow GenAI content into academic publishing. Even the Modern Language Association offers guidelines for how to cite GenAI content, recognizing that this kind of writing will increasingly find its way into scholarly work.

But even if we have good reasons for ditching Gen-AI detection software, we still face a conundrum: how do we hold students accountable for doing the messy, often difficult work of learning? Educators have fantastic reasons for expecting their students to resist using GenAI and to use their own brain to do work. It is increasingly clear that to be able to actually use GenAI to write well, users should know what good writing looks like and should understand their own process for achieving it.

Clearly, we have work to do to develop approaches, curriculum, and assessments that hold students accountable for their learning, but I contend that we cannot involve GenAI plagiarism checkers in our toolbox of solutions. Let us commit to leaving this technology behind for good in our search for a writing pedagogy that works in the age of GenAI.