Artificial Intelligence

New Free Tool for Teachers Can Detect ChatGPT-Generated Student Work, Nonprofit Creators Say

• By Kristal Kuykendall
• 01/31/23

Education technology nonprofits Quill.org and CommonLit.org have launched AIWritingCheck.org to help teachers determine whether writing was human- or AI-generated text, the organizations said in a news release.

The browser-based tool, at aiwritingcheck.org, allows teachers to enter a passage of text between 100 and 400 words in length, click a button, and quickly see the results: whether the text was likely generated by a student or a computer.

In response to the recent launch of ChatGPT — and the widely voiced concerns among education professionals at every level about academic integrity — Quill and CommonLit “built this new tool to be free, scalable, and user-friendly,” they said. AIWritingCheck.org requires no account or subscription to use; the nonprofits said it “can process up to 100,000 essays per day, with an accuracy rate of 80% to 90%.”

Also introduced alongside AI Writing Check is a new toolkit to “help educators utilize AI detection websites responsibly.” Download the AI Check toolkit for educators at bit.ly/ai-check-toolkit.

"As tools like ChatGPT become ubiquitous and more advanced over time, many fear that millions of students will stop engaging in the critically important intellectual exercise of carefully reading a text, building a response, applying the rules of grammar, and revising their writing with feedback,” said Quill.org Founder and Executive Director Peter Gault. “While Quill is built on top of AI, we believe that AI should be used to encourage students to do more writing, not for the AI to write for the students."

Michelle Brown, CommonLit's Founder and Chief Executive Officer, added: "The shortcut of using ChatGPT to do the thinking for you is not one that children will so easily overcome. In K–12, it's the exercise of writing and the thinking that goes into organizing your thoughts that matters — not just the output."

Quill.org and CommonLit.org collectively serve more than 10 million economically disadvantaged students each year with free educational materials to advance literacy, representing 20% of all K–12 students. Learn more at Quill.org and CommonLit.org.