What to do when you’re accused of AI cheating

AI detectors like Turnitin and GPTZero suffer from false positives that can accuse innocent students of cheating. Here’s the advice of academics, AI scientists and students on how to deal with it.

8 min
The distracted boyfriend meme with a professor and a robot.
(Illustration by Elena Lacey/The Washington Post; iStock)
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Your teacher says you used artificial intelligence to cheat. You did no such thing. Now what?

Stay calm, and let the facts help you.

Less than a year into the life of ChatGPT, teachers everywhere are getting AI-detecting tools that promise to expose when students use chatbots to cheat. By August, an AI detector made by the plagiarism-detection company Turnitin had already been run on more than 70 million assignments, it said.

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