Bethan Staton in London

The makers of popular plagiarism detection software are launching a tool that also detects if essays are created using artificial intelligence chatbots, triggering a debate among universities over whether to use the new system to identify student cheating.

Turnitin, which is already used by more than 10,000 educational institutions worldwide, is launching a service on Tuesday that it said can identify AI-generated text with 98 per cent confidence. OpenAI, makers of popular ChatGPT services, has said its plagiarism detection system works only 26 per cent of the time.

“Educators told us that being able to accurately detect AI written text is their first priority right now,” said Turnitin chief executive Chris Caren. “They need to be able to detect AI with very high certainty to assess the authenticity of a student’s work and determine how to best engage with them.”

The launch has proved contentious. Some institutions, including Cambridge and other members of the Russell Group, the body that represents leading UK universities, have said they will opt-out of the new service, according to people familiar with the decision.

Universities are worried the tool may falsely accuse students of cheating, involves handing student data to a private company and prevents people from experimenting with new technologies such as generative AI.

“The concerns have been widely held,” one person familiar with its discussions said. The Russell Group declined to comment.

Those concerns have led the UCISA, the UK membership body supporting technology in education, to work with Turnitin to ensure universities had the option to opt-out of the feature temporarily.

C. Edward Watson, associate vice-president for curricular and pedagogical innovation at the American Association of Colleges and Universities, said there was also a “dubiousness” over the detection system given rapid developments in AI. “There’s a lot of disbelief that it can do the job well,” he said.

The popularity of ChatGPT, a system created by Microsoft-backed company OpenAI that can form arguments and write convincing swaths of text, has led to widespread concern that students will use the software to cheat on written assignments.

That has led to a debate among academics, higher education consultants and cognitive scientists across the world over how universities might develop new modes of assessment in response to the threat to academic integrity posed by AI.

Deborah Green, chief executive of UCISA, said she was concerned that Turnitin was launching its AI detection system with little warning to students as they prepared coursework and exams this summer.

While universities broadly welcomed the new tool they needed time to assess it, she added. “We’ve had no opportunity to test it, so we simply don’t know about what it does and doesn’t do.”

Charles Knight, assistant director at consultancy Advance HE, said lecturers were concerned that they would have no way to investigate why essays had been flagged as being written by AI.

In a single university an error rate of 1 per cent would mean hundreds of students wrongly accused of cheating, he added, with little recourse to appeal.

“It’s a black box,” he said. “We’ve got no idea what those results mean and we aren’t able to have a look at how the software came to those conclusions.”

Turnitin did not immediately respond to a request for comment to the concerns raised about the AI detection tool. But the company said in a statement about the tool’s launch that the technology had been “in development for years” and provided resources to “help the education community navigate and manage [it]”.

The government is set to review how universities “spin out” companies from academic research, as it looks for ways to boost innovation in the UK economy.

The Treasury will on Thursday establish a committee to focus on research commercialisation, examining issues including the size of equity stakes that universities retain, said people familiar with the discussions.

The review follows an increase in the number of companies created from academic research, with universities investing millions annually into activities such as patenting, attracting investors and providing laboratory space for nascent start-ups.

University leaders say the work is essential in turning academic work into viable businesses and projects.

Critics say the UK is underperforming on spinout success, with some entrepreneurs arguing universities impose bureaucratic demands and excessive equity stakes that inhibit growth.

According to Beauhurst, a consultancy, equity investment in spinouts increased from £405mn to £2.54bn in the decade to 2021, but they make up just 3 per cent of the UK’s high-growth companies.

It found universities retain an average equity stake of 24 per cent in spinout companies, although the amount varies.

Nathan Benaich, partner at Air Street Capital, a venture capital funder, said universities should retain smaller stakes in companies and called for the government to legislate for standard terms.

However, a university leader warned against stricter rules, arguing it would impose an “oversimplified solution to a complex problem”.

The review will be chaired by University of Oxford vice-chancellor Irene Tracey and Andrew Williamson, managing partner of funding vehicle Cambridge Innovation Capital, said one person familiar with the plans.

The government did not respond to requests for comment.

Additional reporting by George Parker