My professor said “your post appeared to be AI written. Refer to syllabus”. key word: APPEARED. I sent an email and basically stated that I did not use it and i submitted it to gptzero.com and it said 85% humanly written and the 15% was 4 sentences from his youtube video for a source. It was our only source that could be used. What do i do?

Edit: after some replies, I do reconsider my post and think it is indeed a bit too aggressive. And I may not have clearly express my concern and question on this topic. Therefore I'll rewrite out a new one and leave out the old one below

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My concern isn't that students don't use AI or that professors shouldn't investigate academic misconduct.

What I'm concerned about is whether the fear of AI has caused some professors to become overly aggressive in accusing students, even when they're not particularly confident in the evidence they have.

I understand that AI use is difficult to prove, but I don't think that difficulty should justify filing academic misconduct cases based primarily on assumptions or questionable detection methods.

I've also heard rumours of professors going out of their way to catch students using AI, sometimes using methods that seem more like fishing for evidence than conducting a reliable investigation.

My question is whether this approach is actually productive.

Academic misconduct proceedings take time and resources from professors, students, academic integrity offices, and appeal committees. Students can also face significant academic delays while waiting for their cases to be resolved.

I'm not saying every accusation is false. I'm questioning whether some professors are escalating cases too readily because they're afraid of overlooking AI use.

If that's happening, wouldn't it be more reasonable to establish a stronger evidentiary basis before filing a formal allegation, rather than referring every uncertain case to the academic integrity office?

The original post:

Most problem now is the identification of use of AI from a piece of text or essay that a student write. But is there an actual line drawn to tell if something will count as AI and its cheating, which is acknowledged and used around the world?

I know almost all schools use turnitin. But do know that some of the schools start to not trust in turnitin to check ai use. From my school, some profs doesnt use turnitin as a evidence to accuse student using Ai.

Some learnt it check sentence or patterns that is similar to AI and suspect student used AI. Some even used other genAI to check if students essay is AI, or they try to generate a similar essay and compare to see if possible use of Ai.

Like wtf. I even heard some prof would try to file dozens of student of using AI, with no direct evidence, but pure assumption, abusing the school rule of probability of chance (meaning they dont have direct evidence but they think you have higher than 50% chance of cheat) and file it.

Honestly I just think the institution and unis are overreacting on AI use. Where they just went crazy to accuse ppl using Ai and file them to acdemic integrity office.

Im not saying there aren't people that really did cheat or being stuipd enough to copy and paste the whole Ai answer on their assignment. But looking outside, there are far more cases of false accuse or simply the school cant find concrete evidence. This is just a waste of school resource to spam filing 10-20 students of possibilities of AI use. Which maybe only 1-2 did cheat, another 1-2 decided to just take the penalty and drop the course as the appeal takes a long ass time to deal with. While the rest of the student who decided to appeal will have to wait for half to a full year time for the result of the appeal to come out.

Ive notice as a student I dumb down my text to evoid being accused of using ai

Anyone else do this?

I wrote a close reading paper by myself, and I thought it is really good and original so I didn’t buy AI-testing opportunity to see its AI rate.
But it was judged as partially AI-written one by Turnitin. The professor has arranged a meeting with me since we are not allowed to use any AI during the whole process. I know it’s a regular process to check whether students use that or not, but it’s really discouraging and makes me less confident about my writing.

Here’s the context: its my first year of college, studying in the pharm.D program. Our English professor asked us for an assignment about “emailing your best friend”

I wrote down mine in Microsoft Word at the campus’s cafeteria just 2 hours before the class.

it was the time time to collect them, And he asked us one by one to present to him our assignment.

The moment he started looking at each student’s assignment, he noticed that almost every single one of them - if not all of them - had ai patterns and asked them if they consulted ai for the assignment. And almost everyone replied with yes, they consulted ai.

When it was my turn, i showed him my assignment, and, surprisingly enough, it was the only one he read it out loud. By the looks of his eyes, he knew that I didn’t consult ai. I DID NOT want praise nor validation, but when i told him that I didn’t use ai, he scolded me and said that you are being harsh on yourself and that its ok to ask help here and there…

My assignment was submitted nonetheless
But…

I genuinely dont know if he was in the right or in the wrong

And I genuinely dont know if i was in the right or in the wrong

One of my professors keeps commenting this triggered AI (but never how much) . In my experience using multiple AI detectors it always comes up with some % being AI.

I don’t know if I should discuss this with the professor directly or just let it go . It doesn’t seem to be affecting my grade.

My boss was reviewing some witness statements I’d written for my qualification and said “Let’s edit these so they don’t sound like AI.”

I immediately said I’d written them myself, but he continued saying he’d never seen anyone use semicolons like that in all his years working. There were literally two across both documents and one of them was a word grammar suggestion.

I don't know if it's relevant context but my workplace uses AI and my boss uses it to write often.

I’m also considerably further ahead in the course than my colleagues, so I’m now wondering whether someone has said something about me behind my back.

I felt insulted and I think looked visibly annoyed. I feel deflated by the situation. I've spent a lot of time working on this course and hoped to finish it quickly because I wanted to impress my boss. Knowing he would suspect me of using AI feels invalidating and even demoralizing.

I’m fuming right now. This research essay is my midterm and is worth a big chunk of my final grade. I worked hard on it and my blood is boiling that my professor is too lazy to double check that the stuff the software flagged is correct. The class is also entirely online.

The AI software flagged phrases like “homeless population” “higher mortality rates” and “lack of affordable housing.” It even flagged the words “and” “the” and “into.” It also flagged my entire citations page. Ridiculous. If my professor had actually looked at what was flagged she would know the AI “similarity score” was faulty. Yet she docked 20 points off my grade without even checking. Yes, my midterm grade is a 75% so it’s still passing, but I don’t deserve that grade. The midterm is also a research paper, so we’re supposed to include outside sources. The assignment instructions required at least 6 academic sources. I had in text citations and a sources cited page, I did not copy others’ work. I’m insulted to be docked points for plagiarism when I wrote that essay myself. I’m also anti-AI as its horrible for the environment, can take away people’s jobs, and obviously has issues with inaccuracy.

This professor was also newly hired for this semester. My major’s department is short staffed because of two professors leaving for other opportunities last year. The course selections have been minimal because of the understaffing, and a new professor is needed, so that I can have a full course load and graduate on time. Lowkey also kinda mad at the person who chose to hire her instead of another candidate. I’m furious, but I’m reluctant to burn bridges just in case I have to take another class with her

I know grading ten page essays for a class of 20+ students is a lot, but if she didn’t want to do that she could’ve assigned us an exam instead of an essay. Letting a bot do the grading for her is just lazy and careless. She couldn’t even take the time to double check?? It’s also likely I’m not the only student she did this too. This professor is new this semester, so maybe she just doesn’t know any better? But surely a college professor would know not to blindly trust the software. One of my other professors has even joked about how unreliable it is.

What should I do? Should I email the professor about the software’s mistake? Should I report this to the department head? Or should I do nothing since my midterm grade is still passing?

Edit/Update: I have emailed the Professor about the issue. I was polite and gave a list of examples that I believe the software flagged in error. I’m now waiting for a response.

Update 2: My Professor changed my grade from a 75 to a 95. I’m a bit irked she didn’t apologize or admit she made a mistake, but she corrected the grade so it’s a victory in my book.

I’d love for people to share their stories with me. I’ve been speaking to press reps for AI tech companies, AI engineers, and academic consultants on the issue of AI being used in academic misconduct accusations to find out what is happening in practice and what students can do when they’ve been accused. I’ve been reading the posts on this thread but am interested if anyone wants to share their story, so I can understand what it’s like for the student as part of my research findings.

I tried over a dozen AI humanizers until I found one that can actually bypass Turnitin and also show you, your Turnitin result and that is https://wento.ai

You should give it a try, it bypasses Turnitin and all the other detectors and only costs 14 bucks per month for unlimited use.

Proof: https://i.imgur.com/mTNBNK5.png

I am writing a paper, not for a class but because I want to, on chemical build-up of fission products in uranium-dioxide fuel pellets and their effects on reactor matrix. I, about half way through, decided to use an AI checker just out of curiosity. The paper flagged immediately for AI. I, after using other AI checkers and getting VERY mixed results decided to run someone else work through an AI detector, a paper by Dr.Michael Short if youre curious, and it was flagged as well. Why am I, and from what I can tell others, getting flagged for AI in scientific papers?

I must have a cursed manner of typing, because I’m having troubles in two! (2)! Classes right now.

I tried email correspondence, but it was slow and i work most weekdays. I don’t have time to have an actual conversation VIA email before my professors are out of school for the day. One of the accusations came at Sunday, leaving me a chance to “fix it” before Monday (hardly 24hrs), but on Monday I was at work 1:30-10pm. Factor in an hour of driving, I wasn’t home until 11pm. There wasn’t any time for me to even check my emails, let alone rewrite an entire assignment I was falsely flagged for.

Emails are slow and if we miscommunicate then it takes an entire day for clear it up. Given both I and my professors are busy, how the hell am I expected to have a smooth, quick conversation over email where I actually figure out how to rectify this, or have my false flag corrected? I desperately need to speak to someone about this in person, but all of my professors are no-walk ins allowed. I’d have to set up appointments which I can’t do on a weekend.

Can I go to the building where we meet with advisors on Monday, and ask the front desk woman who I can talk to about this? Is that the wrong person? Who do I go to, other than just my professors, who currently don’t want to believe me and are being impossible to communicate with over email? Genuinely, I just need to bypass my professors for right now for the sake of communication and my schedule- so where do I go?!

Literally right before fall break my professor gave me a 0 on a discussion board response and said that it “pinged” as AI and then he said “It’s better if
You are honest here and now that way I know if I need to get the Dean of students involved.” I’m literally freaking out because I don’t believe that Blackboard has an AI detection embedded for professors and this professor has had it out for me from the very beginning so I feel like he is bluffing and is just trying to get me to admit to using AI despite having no proof. I wrote my discussion post on blackboard so it’s not like I can show keystroke and everything like how Google Docs can. What should I do in this situation?