After universities including Cambridge and Southampton dropped Turnitin over its plans to use students’ work to train AI systems, is it time for Cardiff University to do the same?
As calls across the country for universities to distance themselves have increased in volume, Cardiff’s startling silence so far reads as a flagrant disregard for students’ autonomy over their own work. Despite Turnitin’s position that consent is given upon submission of work, submission of assessed pieces through Learning Central is often a requirement rather than an option for Cardiff University attendees. This rhetoric of acceptance is at odds with the fact that, in lieu of sending work through the system, students risk failing.
While “forced consent” to new AI-training measures is disturbing enough: that consent for these measures may now also be backdated is particularly insidious. Frankly, it’s dystopian to consider the thousands of students Turnitin has collected data from throughout Cardiff University’s over-a-decade-long partnership with the institution. This news must be particularly upsetting for second- and third-year students as well as postgraduates, who have already submitted to the service.
Most courses will have to deal with the updated measures, but it’s the more written-based degrees, such as those offered by the School of Global Humanities, that will face the brunt. A rising sentiment among students undertaking such education is that AI has no place there; indeed, artificiality seems contradictory to the humanity that the field takes its name from. Yet, it’s also these areas that have the most material to be scraped, regularly submitting essays worth thousands of words. In a world where AI is regularly making human contributions redundant, including in the humanities sector, the idea that submitting work might further these systems leaves a sour taste.
It’s certainly something that Linguistics and Spanish undergraduate Tolly opposes, arguing that the increasing prominence of AI in academia is a move towards “technofascism” that only benefits the owners and propagators of AI companies. “The ultimate goal for them is to cut out humanity entirely,” she went on to state to Gair Rhydd. Furthermore, Turnitin’s AI advances mark a promise to “cut up and repurpose” the essays and efforts of those submitting to their system, something she believes is “antithetical” to the study of humanities and “completely the opposite” of students’ desires. To ignore that would be “a moral lacking on the part of the university,” she concluded.
Meanwhile, Emma Williams, a Mental Health Nursing student, told Gair Rhydd that the new regulations are particularly scary for her and her cohort. “We are already so worried that our work will be flagged because Turnitin is already so unreliable,” she wrote. “Using our work to train AI surely makes it so that AI will begin to sound like us: regular students that don’t use generative AI in work.” This common sentiment among students is certainly not an unfounded one in light of official university courses taking action to assist against the potential problem. For example, a mandatory first-year module for English, Communication and Philosophy undergraduates, ‘Writing at University and Beyond’, now includes lectures and resources to help protect students’ work against unfounded accusations of AI abuse. However, for as forward-thinking as these curricular additions are on the part of the module’s creators, it only raises the question of why this burden should fall on the staff and students at all, rather than those in a position to re-evaluate the cooperation with Turnitin on a larger scale.
It remains to be seen just what Cardiff University will do in the face of such controversy, if anything. While its officials have stayed opaque, its students have made their view utterly transparent: to renew their relationship with the disgruntled tech giant would be nothing short of “a slap in the face” to both past and future alumni who have been violated by the new rules. Perhaps, it would be best for the university to turn away from Turnitin before their own integrity is compromised…