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Can SafeAssign Detect AI Writing and Plagiarism?

How does SafeAssign, the popular plagiarism detector integrated with Blackboard LMS, compare to modern plagiarism detection and AI writing tools?

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SafeAssign is one of the most popular and widely-used plagiarism detection programs available today. It’s primarily used by schools and universities and tightly integrated into the popular Blackboard LMS (Learning Management System).

Blackboard and SafeAssign are now also part of Anthology (an EdTech software as a service — SaaS company). 

Initially, SafeAssign was designed to help detect and prevent academic plagiarism

  • How does SafeAssign stack up to modern plagiarism detection? 
  • Can it detect AI writing?

Take a closer look at what SafeAssign is, what it excels at, and where it falls short. Then, compare the differences between traditional plagiarism detectors like SafeAssign and modern AI and plagiarism detection software.

What Is SafeAssign and How Does It Work? 

SafeAssign is one part of the widely-used LMS Blackboard — now part of Anthology.

According to Northern Illinois University, SafeAssign works by comparing student submissions to institutional archives, millions of online articles, and content from numerous academic publishers.

By scanning these documents for matches, SafeAssign identifies similar content in a report. The resulting report shows a percentage score that indicates how much matches text from other sources and how likely it is that the paper contains excessive amounts of paraphrasing or plagiarism

This gives educators the opportunity to check and see if the match occurred due to common phrasing, a properly cited quotation, or it is, in fact, plagiarism. 

SafeAssign is flexible enough to analyze the text for exact (verbatim) matches and paraphrasing.

  • An exact match happens where text from the student’s submission directly matches text from a database. 
  • Paraphrasing detection, on the other hand, is more difficult. This happens when the student has rephrased someone else’s work in their own words but has done so without properly citing the original author. 
  • Improper citations occur when a student tries to cite the author but doesn’t do so fully or correctly. 

Beyond uncovering instances of plagiarism, SafeAssign can also support students as a valuable educational tool. Providing students with access to reports enables them to understand the importance of citing authors correctly. 

Can SafeAssign Detect AI Writing? 

So far, we’ve reviewed how SafeAssign detects plagiarism, but what about AI writing? SafeAssign is a powerful plagiarism detector, but AI detection involves a completely different suite of skills

Although SafeAssign is great at finding exact matches and uncovering instances of paraphrasing, it hasn’t yet released details about providing an AI detector.

Further, in one of Blackboard’s guides on assignment creation, the platform notes, “Research indicates a variety of issues with a reliance on AI detection.

So, although SafeAssign is an excellent tool for detecting plagiarism, at this point in time it seems unlikely that they will include an AI detector as part of their suite of tools.  

Interested in learning more about the efficacy of AI detection software? Read a Meta-Analysis of Studies that review the performance of Originality.ai’s AI detector. Then, check out our AI Content Detector Accuracy Review.

Pros vs. Cons of SafeAssign

SafeAssign Pros

One of SafeAssign’s biggest strengths is its extensive database

  • The database includes voluntarily-submitted documents from students across all of the institutions that use Blackboard. 
  • It also includes access to the ProQuest ABI/Inform Journal Database which spans over two million documents and has a database that dates back to the 1990s.

What’s more, SafeAssign is part of Blackboard, so it’s integrated into the popular learning management system. For students and professors who are well-versed in how Blackboard works, SafeAssign allows them to scan for plagiarism conveniently. 

SafeAssign also features a user-friendly originality report, giving educators a clear way to make an informed decision on whether a paper is or isn’t plagiarism.

SafeAssign Cons

However, SafeAssign is not without its limitations. Although SafeAssign spots exact text matches and paraphrased text, it doesn’t offer AI detection capabilities despite the rise of AI content.

The lack of AI detection means that if educators want to scan assignments for AI-generated content and plagiarism they need to use multiple tools to do so.

A Modern Approach — Combining AI and Plagiarism Detection

With the rapid increase of AI writing tools, tools like Originality.ai that combine AI and plagiarism detection are more important than ever.

Reasons to combine AI with plagiarism detection:

  • Writing tools like ChatGPT, GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Google Gemini are more accessible than ever and generate text on the fly based on expansive training. 
  • The generated text is often entirely new, which means traditional plagiarism detectors may not catch it. 
  • Sophisticated AI models also closely mimic human writing (context and style).

So, it’s easy to see how AI writing tools can throw off traditional plagiarism tools even if they’re drawing upon a database of millions of documents. 

AI’s evolving ability to create contextually relevant, human-like text, right down to the smallest details, means it can easily slip through the cracks of plagiarism detectors that are only looking for exact text matches. 

Beyond its AI and plagiarism detection features, Originality.ai continuously updates its algorithms to keep pace with the latest advancements in AI text generation. As AI models like GPT-4o-mini and others continue to evolve, Originality adapts to uncover new patterns and improve its detection accuracy

Next Steps to Uncover Plagiarism and AI Writing

If you’re looking for a versatile, modern solution to detect plagiarism alongside AI writing, consider Originality.ai

Originality.ai helps bridge the gap by giving you access to a state-of-the-art tool that’s built for plagiarism and AI-generated text detection. That way, you can maintain academic integrity and support students in writing unique, original content.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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%.

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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

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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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