Turnitin, the software used by most Irish and British universities to facilitate digital student submissions, has been under scrutiny for considering an amendment to its End-User License Agreement (EULA).
The proposed amendment, which was intended to be implemented in July, reads as follows: “Turnitin may use your submission (in aggregated, anonymised, and/or de-identified form) for improving or developing AI tools and other products, features, or services.” This would signify an automatic opt-in to free usage of student submissions to train Turnitin’s in-house AI models.
The potential change has caused uproar across Irish and UK universities. Sam Dickinson, Union Affairs Officer of the University of York’s Student Union, said that “the key issue here is that students’ intellectual property is something that should belong to them.” Several universities, namely the University of Southampton, the University of Westminster, and Newcastle University, have announced that they would not be renewing their contract with Turnitin in the next academic year. They explicitly stated that this decision was made in light of concerns regarding a potential change in the provider’s AI policy.
In response to the criticism, Turnitin has said that there would be no changes made to their EULA before September of 2027 “to give us time to discuss any changes with customers.” Reports state that the provider is currently in talks with the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA) to find a viable solution for both sides.
In a statement to the University Times, a spokesperson said that Turnitin is “committed to being transparent around AI product design and data use” and that “the introduction of AI in education raised new questions and concerns about data use and privacy”. Moreover, they referred to their recently launched Turnitin Trust Centre, “which covers Turnitin’s AI principles, AI definitions, how AI is used in Turnitin products, what customers can control, and the full privacy policy.” They have also noted elsewhere that “no student or staff data has been used to develop generative artificial intelligence systems or large language models, and that it has no plans to use student essays for these purposes.”
The AI models trained and used by Turnitin are classification models, rather than those that generate data. Their main purpose for Turnitin is to differentiate between human writing and potentially AI-generated writing, and to thereby detect and flag student submissions that were written using generative AI.
Currently, only those who have the AI Originality Report feature activated consent to their data being used for the purpose of training AI models, according to the Turnitin website. Trinity does not currently use this feature.
In a recent interview with the Irish Independent, Dr Alan Eustace, Assistant Professor in the School of Law, stated that rather than using such tools, Trinity relies on “using research trails, document versions, and oral assessments to verify students’ work.”
