Southampton dumps Turnitin over use of students’ work to train AI

A Russell Group university will no longer use ubiquitous anti-cheating tools provided by Turnitin because of concerns that the company might use students’ work to train artificial intelligence.

The University of Southampton has said it will not renew its contract with the American firm beyond the end of the 2026-27 academic year.

It cited proposed changes “that would have allowed it to use student submissions to train AI services”.

While the university said it understood these had been postponed, the company “still intends to revisit implementing these updates next year”, according to a spokesperson.

They added: “We have decided not to renew our contract beyond the end of the 2026-27 academic year and will begin phasing out the use of this service immediately.

“We will continue to evaluate other options to ensure that academic integrity standards are maintained.”

However, Turnitin, headquartered in California, denied that it is using “customer or student work” to train its in-house composition tool, Turnitin Clarity, which features an AI assistant.

The tool is being pitched as a way for students to craft work that then allows those marking it to see the timeline and conditions under which the assignment was created.

The software “may use anonymised student submissions” to “improve” its detection and assessment tools, a spokesperson told Times Higher Education, but stressed that “privacy, safety, and security” remains one of its five “core principles” when it comes to designing its systems.

Turnitin was committed to treating data “used in AI systems with the same care as all other personal data”, and vows to “limit use, secure access, and apply techniques like anonymisation or pseudonymisation”.

The company has agreements with thousands of universities worldwide for use of its plagiarism and AI detection tools, with students’ work routinely put through the service to determine whether they might have cheated. 

According to Turnitin’s user licence agreement, those who submit papers outside the European Union “grant to Turnitin…a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable license to use such papers” for the “limited purposes” of providing their services and improving their quality.

However, when it comes to processing data provided by those within the EU, the terms stress that General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules mean any data is subject to processing exclusively where it is “necessary for the performance of a task in the public interest or in the exercise of the official authority vested in the controller” – in other words, to facilitate the kinds of service Turnitin provides, like checking for academic integrity and originality.

Thomas Lancaster, a teaching fellow at Imperial College London, told THE he had “no insider knowledge”, but that he thought the company was “doing all of this properly and making sure all the permissions are in place”.

“At the same time, there’s an argument to be made that universities and students themselves are not recognising the value of that data,” he said, of submissions such as essays and assignments.

Asked whether the concerns may prompt more universities to look to develop their own academic integrity tools, Lancaster said: “I do think we’ll start to see more fragmentation in this market. Anthropic announced recently they were watermarking AI-generated text, so that gives another route for universities looking to detect the misuse of generative AI.

“I’d expect rival companies to follow. The main problem with a university relying solely on an in-house tool is it simply can’t easily detect if a student has copied an assignment from a friend at another university, but I can see a world where a consortium of universities joins together to develop their own detection solution, with much more control of the underlying data.”

georgia.luckhurst@timeshighereducation.com