Description: Turnitin's tool to detect writing generated by ChatGPT was reported for incorrectly flagging high school students' original essays as AI-generated, accusations of which are argued as reinforcement of bias from teachers due to the inability to compare against source documents.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Turnitin developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Lucy Goetz and high school students.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
514
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2023-01-20
Editors
Khoa Lam
Applied Taxonomies
CSETv1_Annotator-2 Taxonomy Classifications
Taxonomy DetailsIncident Number
The number of the incident in the AI Incident Database.
514
Special Interest Intangible Harm
An assessment of whether a special interest intangible harm occurred. This assessment does not consider the context of the intangible harm, if an AI was involved, or if there is characterizable class or subgroup of harmed entities. It is also not assessing if an intangible harm occurred. It is only asking if a special interest intangible harm occurred.
no
Notes (AI special interest intangible harm)
If for 5.5 you select unclear or leave it blank, please provide a brief description of why.
You can also add notes if you want to provide justification for a level.
Students are at risk of being wrongfully accused of using AI to write their essays. This does not meet our definition of a Special Interest Harm.
Date of Incident Year
The year in which the incident occurred. If there are multiple harms or occurrences of the incident, list the earliest. If a precise date is unavailable, but the available sources provide a basis for estimating the year, estimate. Otherwise, leave blank.
Enter in the format of YYYY
2023
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
washingtonpost.com · 2023
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
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 artific…
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.