Universities, colleges and schools are wise to be cautious about students using AI for their essays and coursework and have turned to AI checkers to help detect AI-generated content. This has not been without its problems and is not a foolproof solution.

AI checkers can reinforce academic integrity by identifying AI-generated content, particularly as this may be an issue of scale. In 2024 there were nearly 5.7m GCSEs taken and nearly 817,000 A-Level entries and AI checkers can process large volumes of submissions quickly.

However, AI checkers can produce false positives, flagging genuine work as AI-generated, or false negatives. In 2023 Vanderbilt, a private research university in Tennessee, announced that it had stopped using an AI checker due saying that even a false positive rate as low as 1% was too high. If all UK schools submitted GCSE and A-Level essays or coursework papers with a 1% false positive rate, that would mean it would have incorrectly flagged about 65,000 papers as having some of it written by AI!

Next steps

Educational institutions should address artificial intelligence and the companies they use to check work head-on:

1. Adopt an AI policy
2. Implement robust data privacy
3. Regularly evaluate and update AI checkers
4. Training
5. Human supervision

For a more detailed analysis of how this affects schools and what they can do, read the full article on the HCR Law website.

If you need advice, contact me at +44 20 3824 9748 or fjennings@hcrlaw.com.