Grammarly recently launched Grammarly Authorship, a new feature designed to track the provenance of writing and protect against unauthorized use of ai or more traditional forms of plagiarism.
As an educator, I've seen classes filled with ai presentations, so I was eager to try the tool, which is currently available through the free Grammarly plugin in Google Docs and in Grammarly for Chrome and Microsoft Edge, and scheduled for release. to other Grammarly platforms in the future.
Unlike most other ai detection tools, Grammatical authorship It is intended to be used by the writer, not by a teacher evaluating the writing later. Basically, Grammarly Authorship acts as a beefed-up version of Google Doc's “version history.” The tool tracks how much time you spend on the document and how the writing originates: whether the user wrote it or copied and pasted it.
Sometimes Authorship can also indicate where the text was copied and pasted from, and will flag text that it believes is ai-generated, as well as track the use of Grammarly's traditional spell checker. All of this information is provided in a shareable report that also tracks how long it took the user to write a piece of writing and whether they wrote it in multiple sessions.
After using the tool for a week with various writing projects, I'm overall impressed. I see several beneficial potential uses for teachers and students, and unexpectedly find the tool useful for keeping track of how much time I've spent working on a given writing project. (According to Grammarly Authorship, I've spent 22 minutes writing this story so far!)
All that said, unfortunately this is still not a panacea that frees instructors from ai-submitted work. Grammarly Authorship, while a definite step in the right direction, still has some of the same limitations as existing ai screening tools.
What grammatical authorship does well
Grammarly Authorship works as advertised: if you activate it, it will track your activity and provide information on how much was written in the document, compared to what was copied and pasted, etc.
In my tests, the tool correctly identified material I had written in the document, ai-generated text I added as evidence, and quotes I had copied and pasted from another document. He did not recognize that these copied and pasted elements were in quotes and quoted, which would be preferred. That said, a teacher could notice the marked copy-and-paste parts and then quickly look to see if they were cited and attributed correctly.
It's not hard to see how a student worried about being falsely accused of cheating with ai could use it as a protection mechanism. Additionally, students can use it to see exactly which parts of their articles need citations and where perhaps their paraphrasing fell short. It might also inspire a student to rewrite ai-generated text and make it their own, which may not be an ideal outcome, but at least it would involve some more writing practice.
Because of these features, I understand why a professor might consider requiring students to use Grammarly Authorship, as long as their institution has examined their privacy settings and allowed it. Doing so would create a paper trail for each writing task that could be useful to both teacher and student in conversations about plagiarism and the use of ai.
However, despite this potential, I personally would not require students to use Authorship, even if my institution had looked into it for reasons I'll discuss later.
Grammatical limitations of authorship
Despite its many great features, the ai screening portion of Grammarly Authorship will be subject to the same ethical concerns as other ai screening tools. From ai detection tools are never 100 percent accuratethese can and have led to damage false accusations of using ai.
Authorship marks the text as copied and pasted into the document, as well as generated by ai, which may help a little, so a teacher could ask a student where these three paragraphs that were copied and pasted instead came from. of accusing the student of using ai. However, a smart student (and students who use ai are often smart) could simply generate ai text and then type it into their document that the author is verifying. In that case, although the work will be marked as ai-generated, the student will have a document showing that they spent a significant amount of time writing their work, which could falsely indicate that they wrote it.
These doubts aside, I think it's likely that requiring students to use Authorship would reduce some ai usage. It is more difficult to write an ai-generated response than to simply copy and paste it.
More specifically, I personally would not require students to use this type of tool. I am comfortable with tracking my writing grammatically, but not with requiring that others be tracked in the same way. Writing is inherently a private act, full of idiosyncrasies and personal preferences, and requiring all students to write through a certain program invades that privacy and reduces those preferences. Maybe a student likes to write as an email draft or in the note-taking app on their phone, and then copy and paste it, or even dictate the initial text through a preferred speech-to-text product. Authorship would prevent those writing methods.
Would you use authorship with students?
Although I wouldn't require it, I would recommend Grammarly Authorship to students, as long as my institution approved the application. As stated above, I think it can be a useful plagiarism checker that students can use to evaluate their own work. You can also show them how much time they spend writing. For example, if they didn't get the grade they wanted, they might realize that next time they needed to spend more than half an hour on an assignment.
That said, I would not require students to share their authorship reports with me and, in fact, I would advise against it. In other words, I think it's useful as a personal writing tool, but as a writing instructor, I don't think the potential benefits outweigh the negatives, at least in its current form.
I plan to continue using it for my writing and will recommend it to other educators for personal use. While I don't think Grammarly Authorship answers the question of what we're going to do about using ai in writing classes, I do like that Grammarly is exploring using ai in a way that seeks to protect human writing .
For the record, according to my authorship report, this story was 100% human-written, with 2% using traditional Grammarly grammar checking and 0% ai-generated content.
