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Can Canvas Detect AI Cheating and Plagiarism

Explore Canvas' effectiveness in detecting AI cheating and plagiarism. Learn how it handles AI-generated content, including ChatGPT and Bard, in this in-depth analysis.

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Introduction

Our text compare tool is a fantastic, lightweight tool that provides plagiarism checks between two documents. Whether you are a student, blogger or publisher, this tool offers a great solution to detect and compare similarities between any two pieces of text. In this article, I will discuss the different ways to use the tool, the primary features of the tool and who this tool is for. There is an FAQ at the bottom if you run into any issues when trying to use the tool.

What makes Originality.ai’s text comparison tool stand out?

Keyword density helper – This tool comes with a built-in keyword density helper in some ways similar to the likes of SurferSEO or MarketMuse the difference being, ours is free! This feature shows the user the frequency of single or two word keywords in a document, meaning you can easily compare an article you have written against a competitor to see the major differences in keyword densities. This is especially useful for SEO’s who are looking to optimize their blog content for search engines and improve the blog’s visibility.

Ways to compare

File compare – Text comparison between files is a breeze with our tool. Simply select the files you would like to compare, hit “Upload” and our tool will automatically insert the content into the text area, then simply hit “Compare” and let our tool show you where the differences in the text are. By uploading a file, you can still check the keyword density in your content.

URL compare

Comparing text between URLs is effortless with our tool. Simply paste the URL you would like to get the content from (in our example we use a fantastic blog post by Sherice Jacob found here) hit “Submit URL” and our tool will automatically retrieve the contents of the page and paste it into the text area, then simply click “Compare” and let our tool highlight the difference between the URLs. This feature is especially useful for checking keyword density between pages!

Simple text compare

You can also easily compare text by copying and pasting it into each field, as demonstrated below.

Features of Originality.ai’s Text Compare Tool

Ease of use

Our text compare tool is created with the user in mind, it is designed to be accessible to everyone. Our tool allows users to upload files or enter a URL to extract text, this along with the lightweight design ensures a seamless experience. The interface is simple and straightforward, making it easy for users to compare text and detect the diff.

Multiple text file format support

Our tool provides support for a variety of different text files and microsoft word formats including pdf file, .docx, .odt, .doc, and .txt, giving users the ability to compare text from different sources with ease. This makes it a great solution for students, bloggers, and publishers who are looking for file comparison in different formats.

Protects intellectual property

Our text comparison tool helps you protect your intellectual property and helps prevent plagiarism. This tool provides an accurate comparison of texts, making it easy to ensure that your work is original and not copied from other sources. Our tool is a valuable resource for anyone looking to maintain the originality of their content.

User Data Privacy

Our text compare tool is secure and protects user data privacy. No data is ever saved to the tool, the users’ text is only scanned and pasted into the tool’s text area. This makes certain that users can use our tool with confidence, knowing their data is safe and secure.

Compatibility

Our text comparison tool is designed to work seamlessly across all size devices, ensuring maximum compatibility no matter your screen size. Whether you are using a large desktop monitor, a small laptop, a tablet or a smartphone, this tool adjusts to your screen size. This means that users can compare texts and detect the diff anywhere without the need for specialized hardware or software. This level of accessibility makes it an ideal solution for students or bloggers who value the originality of their work and need to compare text online anywhere at any time.

How good is Canvas at detecting AI cheating and plagiarism? Can Canvas detect ChatGPT, Bard or other AI-written content? In this detailed article, we’ll take a closer look at Canvas’ capabilities in terms of what it can do and what it cant when it comes to AI generated text, plagiarism and cheating. Let’s take a closer look. 

Understanding the Canvas Platform

In order to better understand how Canvas handles AI writing and plagiarism detection, we first have to take a step back and understand what Canvas is and how it works.

What is Canvas?

Canvas is a learning management system or LMS. It’s well-known for having a user-friendly interface and allows teachers to create and organize courses, share assignments, communicate with students and provide helpful feedback. Canvas prioritizes usability and accessibility and is used in various institutions ranging from kindergarten to higher education and even corporate training. 

One of Canvas’ biggest strengths is its ability to integrate with a wide variety of third-party tools. This allows it to go beyond an ordinary LMS and incorporate a wide range of technologies including multimedia content, real-time updates and feedback, interactive learning modules and perhaps most importantly, plagiarism detection. 

Because Canvas is used in so many schools and higher learning institutions, it’s important for the platform to incorporate the latest in technology, including technologies designed to detect and flag the use of AI, plagiarized content and much more. In order to understand how Canva treats AI and plagiarism, we first have to look at how AI and LMS solutions like Canvas have become so intertwined. 

The Use of AI in Academia

AI itself has become invaluable in academia; paving the way for a variety of uses. It has been used to analyze complex data sets, automate tasks and process incredible amounts of data in order to make predictions and find patterns. AI is used in academic research to speed up scientific discoveries as well as give researchers a virtual environment in which to test their hypothesis. This type of in-depth exploration simply hasn’t been available until now

AI is also used by teachers to allow more personalized learning. AI can tailor content to meet individual student needs, changing to their pace and breaking down complex or difficult–to-understand concepts in a way that the student can grasp them more easily. With the use of chatbots, students can also ask the AI questions in order to get clarification on an assignment. 

But AI in academia isn’t without its challenges. As it continues to evolve, AI writing tools in particular have drawn a great deal of attention and concern from those in the academic world, and for good reason. 

The Rise of AI Writing Tools

AI writing tools have significantly changed the content creation landscape. By using advanced machine learning algorithms and natural language processing, AI writing tools look for language patterns in order to mimic human writing styles. Although these tools were initially developed to help with sentence flow and grammar checking, they’ve advanced to the point where they can now write essays, compose poetry, craft stories and even create detailed technical resorts with minimal human intervention or input. 

Because of AI writing platforms like ChatGPT ad Bard and their ability to write human-sounding text, it’s not surprising that students from all educational levels leverage these tools to write their essays for them. Whether or not it can be considered plagiarism is still up for debate among legal scholars, since a machine can’t actually author a text. However, for many institutions and grade levels, using AI is akin to plagiarizing, and there are harsh academic penalties as a result. 

What AI Writing Means for Academic Integrity

AI writing has become a hot issue of debate at academic institutions around the world. On one hand, AI has the potential to help students with proper essay structure, grammar and the overall writing process. For those students who struggle with learning disabilities or language barriers, AI can help them articulate what they want to say. 

But the technology is very much a double-edged sword in that because it can create high-quality, original-looking text with minimal input, it has also cultivated a culture of misuse. Students may be tempted to pass off AI-written content as their own, preventing them from learning valuable skills like critical thinking. 

AI plagiarism detection has also become more sophisticated. This has led to the development of plagiarism detection tools built into LMS platforms like Canvas. 

How Does Canvas Detect Plagiarism? 

Canvas itself doesn’t have a built-in plagiarism detection tool. It generally integrates with third-party tools like Turnitin to handle its plagiarism scanning. Rather than go off-site to scan for plagiarism, these tools are designed to integrate within Canvas, making it easy and familiar for educators and students to work with them. 

How Canvas Searches for and Flags Plagiarism

With most tools, the plagiarism detection process starts when students submit an assignment. If Canvas is set up to check assignments for plagiarism, the assignment automatically goes to the plagiarism detection service. From here, the tool then compares the content to its databases. These databases may include websites, other academic essays, subject-specific databases and more. Various algorithms are used to help detect plagiarism beyond what’s possible with simple text matching. The plagiarism detection tool then creates a report that often flags which sentences or passages (if any) may be plagiarized and the percentage of similarity that matches other sources. It will also show where those sources were found. 

Keep in mind that although these plagiarism detection tools can help identify similarities between a student’s writing and a passage that already exists in a database, this in and of itself does not indicate plagiarism. That judgment ultimately lies with the instructor. 

Integrating Canvas with Third Party Plagiarism Detection Tools

Canva’s integration with third party plagiarism detection tools happens through a framework called LTI or Learning Tools Interoperability. This allows for external tools to be integrated with it in a way that’s familiar and localized within the Canvas environment. The process is designed this way to keep it easy to use for instructors and students, so that plagiarism checks can become a part of the assignment submission and grading process. 

In order for any type of tool to work with an LMS like Canvas, it needs to be LTI-compliant. The LTI standard was developed by the IMS Global Learning Consortium that allows different learning tools to communicate with each other. An administrator or instructor must then set up the necessary permissions to make the tool available in Canvas. This is usually done at a per-institute level to keep the process uniform across all courses. 

From there, when an assignment is created in Canvas, instructors can toggle on and off the plagiarism detection feature. Instructors can then set up the individual options and configurations depending on the tool selected. 

How Has AI Affected Traditional Cheating Methods? 

With the introduction of AI, the landscape of cheating has become even more sophisticated and at times, difficult to track. AI writing tools, for example, can write original essays and reports which makes it harder to detect plagiarism using traditional methods. This in and of itself goes well beyond just copying or paraphrasing text from other research. 

AI doesn’t just stop at writing, though. AI algorithms are engineered to solve complex problems ranging from mathematical equations to coding and much more. Students can submit AI-generated solutions as their own and completely bypass the learning and understanding process. 

But with these advanced tactics to cheat, AI has also been its own savior, making it easier to detect cheating as well. AI plagiarism detectors are now able to analyze writing and compare student submissions against online sources which include academic databases and AI-generated content to determine if it’s truly their style of writing. 

AI has also helped the learning landscape to evolve so that learning is no longer just about memorizing and repeating but rather critical thinking and problem-solving. These skills take longer to develop but are also more valuable and harder to “cheat’. 

How Does “AI Writing” Actually Work? 

When an AI like ChatGPT “writes”, some pretty amazing things are happening in the background. AI writing tools are trained on large data sets that include lots of information, including books, websites, articles and more. This allows the AI to learn how human language works across different styles and structures. 

AI also uses different types of machine learning models like neural networks. One of the most popular types of neural network is the Transformer model. This model looks for patterns and relationships within the training data and learns how to “predict” the next word or sentence in a sequence. It does this so quickly and with such naturality that it seems to be “writing”. 

Last, but not least, there’s also NLP or Natural Language Processing. This field of study focuses on teaching the AI (or computers) to understand, interpret and generate human language. NLP is also used to output text that makes sense when presented with a prompt by the user. 

AI essentially uses the same patterns it learned in training to generate text that matches the inquiry. In the case of tools like ChatGPT, the next word or phrase that appears is whichever one has the highest likelihood of being appropriate for the sentence given the context. 

How Does Canvas Detect AI-Generated Text? 

For all its capabilities, Canvas cannot detect AI generated text. If you’re concerned about a text potentially being AI-generated, using a tool like Originality.AI can help you discover the answer with greater probability. Beyond just AI-generated text, Originality.AI can also detect  plagiarized text by searching through a comprehensive number of databases, websites and other sources while flagging potential plagiarism. 

However, it’s worth noting that Originality.AI isn’t integrated with Canvas. It does, however, accept documents in a variety of formats for plagiarism detection and/or AI writing detection, including Google Docs, Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, LibreOffice and direct copy/paste. You can optionally choose to have documents examined for plagiarism, AI writing or both.The process itself only takes a few seconds, and you’ll get a percentage along with highlighted areas showing potential plagiarism or AI-written content. 

Strategies for Educators to Prevent Cheating, AI Writing and Plagiarism

Some of the best strategies to help educators prevent cheating, AI writing and plagiarism involve a fresh, new perspective at how assignments are handled. Look for ways to personalize assignments or tailor the content of the course to students’ individual experiences. Focus on assignments that require students to submit drafts, outlines or annotated bibliographies throughout the term. This makes it harder to cheat but also improves the learning process. 

Be aware of the limitations of plagiarism detection tools. Teach students how to properly research and cite their work. Give varied types of assignments. Instead of always requiring essays, use different methods like group work, individual projects, presentations in class and more. This will let you evaluate how each student learns from a variety of angles to get the full picture of their understanding of the topic. 

Above all, promote open communication in your classroom. If students are having difficulties with their assignment, encourage them to come to you. Sometimes they resort to cheating if they feel unsupported or overwhelmed. Keep an eye on their writing style. If it changes drastically it could be a sign that they’ve plagiarized material or are using an AI writing tool.

And last, but not least, AI and plagiarism methods are always changing and evolving. You may need to adapt your strategies for assessment and the technologies you use in order to be prepared for when new methods of cheating come about. Being informed about the latest advances and discoveries in AI also makes it easier to keep a finger on the pulse of its development so that you can confront the issue head-on and with greater confidence overall. 

Try Originality.AI now for both plagiarism and AI writing detection and take advantage of cutting edge machine learning and NLP technologies to uncover potential AI writing, patchwork, mosaic and other advanced forms of plagiarism.

Sherice Jacob

Sherice Jacob is a seasoned copywriter and content professional fluent in English, Spanish, and Catalan, with over 25 years of experience crafting high-converting copy. Passionate about AI, she enjoys exploring the new innovations and possibilities it brings to the world of content creation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I have to fill out the entire form?

No, that’s one of the benefits, only fill out the areas which you think will be relevant to the prompts you require.

Why is the English so poor for some prompts?

When making the tool we had to make each prompt as general as possible to be able to include every kind of input. Not to worry though ChatGPT is smart and will still understand the prompt.

In The Press

Originality.ai has been featured for its accurate ability to detect GPT-3, Chat GPT and GPT-4 generated content. See some of the coverage below…

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Featured by Leading Publications

Originality.ai did a fantastic job on all three prompts, precisely detecting them as AI-written. Additionally, after I checked with actual human-written textual content, it did determine it as 100% human-generated, which is important.

Vahan Petrosyan

searchenginejournal.com

I use this tool most frequently to check for AI content personally. My most frequent use-case is checking content submitted by freelance writers we work with for AI and plagiarism.

Tom Demers

searchengineland.com

After extensive research and testing, we determined Originality.ai to be the most accurate technology.

Rock Content Team

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Jon Gillham, Founder of Originality.ai came up with a tool to detect whether the content is written by humans or AI tools. It’s built on such technology that can specifically detect content by ChatGPT-3 — by giving you a spam score of 0-100, with an accuracy of 94%.

Felix Rose-Collins

ranktracker.com

ChatGPT lacks empathy and originality. It’s also recognized as AI-generated content most of the time by plagiarism and AI detectors like Originality.ai

Ashley Stahl

forbes.com

Originality.ai Do give them a shot! 

Sri Krishna

venturebeat.com

For web publishers, Originality.ai will enable you to scan your content seamlessly, see who has checked it previously, and detect if an AI-powered tool was implored.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why is it important to check for plagiarism?

Tools for conducting a plagiarism check between two documents online are important as it helps to ensure the originality and authenticity of written work. Plagiarism undermines the value of professional and educational institutions, as well as the integrity of the authors who write articles. By checking for plagiarism, you can ensure the work that you produce is original or properly attributed to the original author. This helps prevent the distribution of copied and misrepresented information.

What is Text Comparison?

Text comparison is the process of taking two or more pieces of text and comparing them to see if there are any similarities, differences and/or plagiarism. The objective of a text comparison is to see if one of the texts has been copied or paraphrased from another text. This text compare tool for plagiarism check between two documents has been built to help you streamline that process by finding the discrepancies with ease.

How do Text Comparison Tools Work?

Text comparison tools work by analyzing and comparing the contents of two or more text documents to find similarities and differences between them. This is typically done by breaking the texts down into smaller units such as sentences or phrases, and then calculating a similarity score based on the number of identical or nearly identical units. The comparison may be based on the exact wording of the text, or it may take into account synonyms and other variations in language. The results of the comparison are usually presented in the form of a report or visual representation, highlighting the similarities and differences between the texts.

String comparison is a fundamental operation in text comparison tools that involves comparing two sequences of characters to determine if they are identical or not. This comparison can be done at the character level or at a higher level, such as the word or sentence level.

The most basic form of string comparison is the equality test, where the two strings are compared character by character and a Boolean result indicating whether they are equal or not is returned. More sophisticated string comparison algorithms use heuristics and statistical models to determine the similarity between two strings, even if they are not exactly the same. These algorithms often use techniques such as edit distance, which measures the minimum number of operations (such as insertions, deletions, and substitutions) required to transform one string into another.

Another common technique for string comparison is n-gram analysis, where the strings are divided into overlapping sequences of characters (n-grams) and the frequency of each n-gram is compared between the two strings. This allows for a more nuanced comparison that takes into account partial similarities, rather than just exact matches.

String comparison is a crucial component of text comparison tools, as it forms the basis for determining the similarities and differences between texts. The results of the string comparison can then be used to generate a report or visual representation of the similarities and differences between the texts.

What is Syntax Highlighting?

Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors and integrated development environments (IDEs) that helps to visually distinguish different elements of a code or markup language. It does this by coloring different elements of the code, such as keywords, variables, functions, and operators, based on a predefined set of rules.

The purpose of syntax highlighting is to make the code easier to read and understand, by drawing attention to the different elements and their structure. For example, keywords may be colored in a different hue to emphasize their importance, while comments or strings may be colored differently to distinguish them from the code itself. This helps to make the code more readable, reducing the cognitive load of the reader and making it easier to identify potential syntax errors.

How Can I Conduct a Plagiarism Check between Two Documents Online?

With our tool it’s easy, just enter or upload some text, click on the button “Compare text” and the tool will automatically display the diff between the two texts.

What Are the Benefits of Using a Text Compare Tool?

Using text comparison tools is much easier, more efficient, and more reliable than proofreading a piece of text by hand. Eliminate the risk of human error by using a tool to detect and display the text difference within seconds.

What Files Can You Inspect with This Text Compare Tool?

We have support for the file extensions .pdf, .docx, .odt, .doc and .txt. You can also enter your text or copy and paste text to compare.

Will My Data Be Shared?

There is never any data saved by the tool, when you hit “Upload” we are just scanning the text and pasting it into our text area so with our text compare tool, no data ever enters our servers.

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