New tools designed to help students rewrite artificial intelligence-generated essays should prompt a radical rethink in regulation, with platforms required to work with universities on tackling plagiarism, a legal expert has urged.

At the start of the new academic year, universities have been warned about an explosion of companies offering low-cost services to evade cheating checks, many of which are being aggressively marketed to ¡°anxious students¡± on TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, said Michael Veale, associate professor in digital rights and regulation at UCL.

Some companies are boasting blogs with titles such as ¡°How to bypass Turnitin¡± and ¡°How to write an AI-resistant essay¡±, by Dr Veale and colleague No?lle Gaumann has found.

This was a sign that essay mills have pivoted from offering made-to-order essays to providing tools to disguise AI-written content, Dr Veale told Times Higher Education.

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In some cases, ¡°institutional plagiarism checkers seem to be playing both sides of the market¡±, with some large edtech firms providing both a ¡°premium AI¡­to rephrase AI generated or normally plagiarised work so that it can avoid detection¡± and a plagiarism detector.

Legislation in England aimed at eradicating contract cheating should be updated to force AI firms to work with university authorities, said Dr Veale.

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Campus resource: Can we spot AI-written content?

¡°Educational providers could be offered, within examination periods, the ability to pass examination or problem questions securely to an [AI services] provider,¡± he said, with firms assessing the likelihood of plagiarism using their tools.

Technology providers should ¡°not seek to ban or block such queries, as this would be in the direction of internet switch-offs for exams¡­but should instead?retain?the results of these queries in an answer bank which licensed plagiarism detection tools have access to as part of the corpus¡±, said Dr Veale.

He added: ¡°More importantly, universities need to stop being fatalist, flaccid rule-takers around technologies ¨C the current leadership seem to feel they have no ability to drag these companies to the table and obtain concessions and governance mechanisms from them. This needs to change.¡±

Academics lamented being swamped by mediocre AI-written essays during this summer¡¯s marking season, with many unconvinced by a shift away from AI bans towards asking students to declare AI use.

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¡°There are the statements of generative AI use that some universities are requiring on assessments, and also more specific guidance on assessment briefs, but it¡¯s still rather variable,¡± commented Thomas Lancaster, an academic integrity expert based at Imperial College London.

¡°I¡¯m still seeing questionable practices, like requiring students to quote and reference GenAI text and to provide copies of the chats, which is unworkable in many situations, as a student may be using multiple chats and different systems.¡±

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com