Barnes & Noble Education's free AI detector helps prevent academic plagiarism

Kimberly Redmond//March 28, 2023

Student Brands, an education technology company owned by Basking Ridge-based Barnes & Noble Education Inc. (BNED), is launching a free tool to help teachers identify content generated by artificial intelligence.

Developed to detect human versus bot-generated text, IdentifAI uses perplexity to measure the levels of predictability of what is being written by looking at sentence structure and how consistent the words are, according to BNED.

Users can paste up to 1,000 words at a time into the platform, which will then instantly highlight all portions detected as AI-written. During initial testing, the AI checker accurately identified chatbot-authored writings 90% of the time and has been tested against popular text generators, including ChatGPT, WriteSonic, Quillbot and Jasper, the company says.

IdentifAI is available here, but may be down during high volume periods, according to BNED.

artificial intelligence — “We believe that AI can awaken a student’s critical thinking skills, but it should not become a substitute for thinking itself,” said Sudhir Krishnaswamy, chief technology officer of Barnes and Noble Education Digital Student Solutions and CEO of Student Brands. – PIXABAY

Sudhir Krishnaswamy, chief technology officer of Barnes and Noble Education Digital Student Solutions and chief executive officer of Student Brands, said, “We believe that AI can awaken a student’s critical thinking skills, but it should not become a substitute for thinking itself.”

“As large language models become more prevalent, we want to ensure that educators and students are provided AI detection tools as part of the bartleby Write service in addition to the plagiarism and grammar detection that they know and love,” Krishnaswamy said.

Tools such as ChatGPT have exploded in popularity for their ability to write just about anything on command. Meanwhile, concerns are growing that students will use it to cheat on homework. As a result, several large school districts across the country, including New York City and Los Angeles, blocked its use on school devices and networks.

Several other software programs aimed at reining in AI plagiarism and forgery have also popped up in recent months, including one created by Princeton University senior Edward Tian.

At the same time, BNED is also developing a way to help educators use AI as a teaching tool.

According to the company, the new offering – which is scheduled to be released this fall – seeks to teach students to become better writers by helping them fully explore the various facets of a topic and providing them with suggestions for where they may have missed a critical point.

It will provide a writing experience that starts with an essay prompt and a blank page and provide guidance toward alternate ways of saying something without offering up paraphrased text. The tool will have human and AI-written plagiarism checks, coverage analysis through intents, and suggestions that a particularly opinionated piece of writing be supported by a citation.