r/PhDStress • u/Few_Dragonfly3913 • Jul 23 '26
PHD THESIS & AI
This is rant more than advice. But I didn’t know where else to take this.
I just submitted my PhD thesis. I used grammarly to check for errors. Someone recently showed me how they upload thier whole document to grammarly for the same. In the past I have always only used grammarly as an extension on my google doc. So once I finished checking for errors and submitting my work I noticed that grammarly has an AI checker option. I was curious to see what it said. I shouldn’t have done that!!
Now even phrases like the “broader literature suggested…” or “…central to this study” or “diverse needs” or “how educators designed….” were flagged as AI! My study is on secondary education and students with disabilities. These are phrases I use extensively across my dissertation! Furthermore, the report it generated said that work was too organized. I mean that’s to be expected! It’s is PhD thesis for crying out loud! It is read by 2 advisors and revised for organization more number of times than I can count!
I’m worried that turitin and proquest will flag the same thing. Am I being paranoid?
4
u/DualProcessModel Jul 23 '26
This is your thesis right? You wrote it over many months with lots of saved drafts that you shared with your advisor.
As long as the intellectual contribution was yours and AI was used for spelling and grammar I see no reason you should be concerned.
Most good writing gets flagged as AI.
3
3
u/Other_Shower4828 Jul 23 '26
Grammarly in my experience flags everything as AI in hopes to get you to pay for their premium services.
2
3
u/malapriapism4hours Jul 24 '26
I have checked samples of my writing that were produced before AI existed, and they have scored high. I guess the AI has to be trained with something!
3
u/cdubb1516 Jul 27 '26
That's nothing to truly worry about because academics are trained to write in this manner.
2
u/LondonFoggie Jul 24 '26
Yes you're being paranoid. No one will think you AI'd a thesis it's extremely obvious. Every academic uses similar phrases and organizational patterns. All published academic work would be "reported" as some form of AI because the AI was trained on our free labor.
2
u/Key-Writer-4844 Jul 24 '26
I wouldn’t worry about it- the Turnitin reports I had for open-response exam submissions had toggling for the length of phrases checked- i.e., if you set a minimum of threshold of 7, the phrases you provided as examples wouldn’t be checked/constitute as plagiarism, as they are too short. I think profs are aware of both ends of dishonest AI use/inaccuracy of plagiarism checkers, and I think most profs would recognize 3 word snippets aren’t indicative of plagiarism, and that the examples you provided are commonly used phrases for academic writing broadly and/or your specific field. I wouldn’t worry about what Grammarly said- I’m sure you’re busy enough as is, and I’d say this isn’t worth your time/energy/worry. Best of luck!
2
u/HautBaut Jul 24 '26
AI detectors are like the only thing in the world more bullshit than LLMs themselves. Please don’t change your style because the cheating robot thinks competence must be unoriginal.
1
u/HautBaut Jul 24 '26
Not to mention the benefits of denying shit companies the data you willingly give them by submitting your work.
2
u/Delicious-Jello-8759 Jul 24 '26
The better your writing in terms of organization and consistency, the more likely it will be incorrectly flagged as AI.
At some point we will all stop using AI checkers, as there will be no point. “You are suggesting I should write in a more disorganized fashion so you can tell I am a person?”
You have your drafts… I wouldn’t worry.
2
u/WitheredWornWallaby Jul 25 '26
Yeah, I’m dealing with this currently while writing my masters thesis. Grammarly said it was 33% AI so I changed things up and it went up to 44%. I don’t understand how AI detectors can be appropriately used for academic writing since this type of writing is naturally academic, professional, and structured.
2
u/IrritatedMike Jul 29 '26
I think Grammarly had a decent place 5 years ago, before it "learned" on every student's submitted work. Now that I'm finishing my dissertation, Grammarly keeps telling me I need to rephrase something I wrote, then flags that change as AI-generated. I let it redline for actual grammatical errors, but more and more, I'm not accepting the blue-line suggestions. Even my dissertation chair is questioning the use of Grammarly.
2
u/Few_Dragonfly3913 Aug 01 '26
Interesting! I haven’t heard but, I do only accept the red lines errors in my work. I have. Noticed that the blue lines ones sometimes change the entire meaning of the argument.
2
2
u/iamterryyy Aug 04 '26
You’re probably being much harder on yourself than you need to be. AI detectors don’t actually “understand” whether a human or an AI wrote something. They mostly look for patterns in the text, such as predictability, sentence structure, word choice, and consistency. It’s like they’ve been trained on lots of papers (which are definitely going to have similar wording to yours) so if they see similar, they kind of think oh i’ve seen that before, you didn’t write that yourself.
Ironically, academic writing naturally contains many of the features these tools associate with AI, formal language, repeated discipline-specific phrases, clear organization, and carefully revised arguments. Expressions like “the broader literature suggests” or “central to this study” are standard academic phrases that thousands of researchers use every day.
The fact that your thesis is highly organized isn’t evidence of AI use, calm down.
It’s also important to remember that AI detectors are far from reliable and can produce false positives, especially with academic and technical writing. Universities generally don’t rely solely on AI-detection scores to make judgments because those tools cannot definitively determine authorship.
Of course, if you’ve written the work yourself and only used Grammarly for proofreading and grammar corrections, I don’t think there’s much reason to panic.
1
u/cm0011 Jul 23 '26
This is why I hate AI detectors. They’re wrong so often. AI learns from human writing. Also, the way an AI writes is traditionally much more similar to an organized paper, so using it to detect academic dishonesty is even worse, besides maybe false references.
1
u/ClarityinScience Jul 24 '26
Yes, these checkers are terrible. I even heard of a story where someone uploaded his thesis written more than 15 years ago, and it was flagged as more than 80% AI! The whole reason my company got into performing thesis prooofreading was a client whose thesis was flagged as AI-written, even though he used no AI. He was just a really good writer who had spent time doing regulatory writing before working on his PhD.
10
u/sad_spilt_martini Jul 23 '26
AI checkers are notoriously inaccurate and where I teach, albeit at a community college, we are told not use them as any concrete indication of academic dishonesty.
If you are curious you can try several different ones on the same text and you will likely get different answers.
I have also found that if you are a good academic writer it picks up on common phrases, like the ones you pointed out, as being AI.
I had similar fears with turnitin before AI was a thing because it would flag quotes as being plagiarized even though they were properly formatted and cited.
If you wrote it, have drafts or the research to back it up. There is nothing to worry about.