How To Not Get Caught Plagiarizing In The New Year

So, you’ve decided to use AI to write your essay. If its come to this, I suspect you’ve considered every other option but just can’t find the time to write it yourself. Although this situation isn't ideal, if you’re not gonna learn your course materials, at least you can learn how to use AI tools.

I usually tell readers to avoid plagiarism, but if AI is you’re only option, the least I can do is make sure you don’t wind up getting punished too hard.

Table of Contents

• What is Plagiarism?

• Plagiarism Detection Software

• Writing Essays with AI

• Using Undetectable AI

• Conclusion

What is Plagiarism?

Traditionally, plagiarism is the theft of someone else’s words or ideas without proper credit. However, with the advent of AI, academic integrity guidelines have broadened what constitutes plagiarism to include using an AI ghostwriter.

AI plagiarism is a less egregious type of plagiarism than the traditional sort since you’re technically not stealing anyone’s words, but still institutions need you to submit your own work, not an AI's.

Using AI to write an essay for a meaningless class might not seem like a big deal, however if a student wants to go as far as having AI write a journal article for them, the consequences of plagiarism can be extremely severe.

Serious journals and research papers require an authors own words, own work, own ideas, and own writing. Full stop. Student papers or high school essays about which comedy movies aliens might like in a class you barely attend, those have more room for help from ChatGPT or, even better, undetectable AI tools.

Plagiarism Detection Software

At this point, most professors have plagiarism checking systems built into their own heads because of the vast amount of students using AI. Still, to aid in their investigation, every academic institution is using some form of AI detector.

Students plagiarize with AI at astounding rates. Depending on which study you cite, today, 89% of students are using AI for homework. So, maybe you shouldn’t feel so bad that you’re stuck in the middle of a technological revolution impacting academia the hardest.

Plagiarism checkers, like Turnitin, work by sifting through your text and searching for unoriginal quotations and the watermarks of AI writing. Those watermarks include simplicity and precision in word choice, sentence length, and sentence structured as measured by perplexity and burstiness.

Writing Essays With AI

Now that I’ve explained every reason why you should take the painstaking effort into drafting your own student writing, here’s how to avoid plagiarism accusations after AI completes your student work.

If you’re gonna make the mistake of using ChatGPT, at least use the more recent o1 model because it’s slightly less detectable than previous OpenAI models like GPT 4. You have to make sure any works cited in the essay it generates are authentic and original sources and not AI hallucinations because ChatGPT does hav a track record of making things up.

Use quotation marks to notate every in-text citation to ensure you’re making it clear that you’re citing sources and not claiming the text or ideas are originally yours. Then, you have to make sure all the source materials you’ve cited are formatted into the proper bibliography whether you’re required to use MLA, APA, or another format.

After all that, at least you won’t get accused of traditional plagiarism. However, if you want to make sure you won’t get in trouble for AI plagiarism, you will have to use an undetectable AI engine.

Using Undetectable AI

Tricking AI detectors requires the AI generated text to read like human writing. Doing so requires the watermarks of AI writing, meaning the precise, simple, and robotic language, be replaced with the watermarks of human writing, which are (complexity, randomness, and naturalness.

Undetectable engines specialize in generating human writing with those qualities. Tools such as AI humanizers allow users to input essays created by ChatGPT and rewrite them using human writing.

More advanced engines even have features like In-text citations that let you click upon a quote and immediately give it the proper citation style before formatting the essay’s bibliography in any style you need.

Once you’ve generated a first draft of your essay that you can submit with confidence, you need to think twice and put in a little bit of effort to ensure your work is safe.

Personalizing an AI generated essay to sound like your own writing is essential. Input the words you use and ideas you’ve communicated in the past and it'll give your essay a more authentic feel.

The final step should be running your essay into an AI detector of your own. Enhanced AI detectors don’t just tell you how much AI is present in your work, they also accurately predict what Turnitin’s results will be. Once you lower your AI score in these detectors to zero, then your essay is ready for submission.

Conclusion

Plagiarism is a serious academic crime and can get you in hot water or even expelled. However, one can expect ethical codes to change as AI continues to integrate into society and academia more and more.

For now, if you have no other option than using AI to write your essays, cover your bases by taking all the steps laid out in this guide.

• Make sure to fact-check your AI essay to make sure all the sources are authentic and in the proper citation style.

• Format bibliography properly according to the style your assignment is requesting.

• Use an undetectable AI engine to ensure your writing style isn’t a dead giveaway as to the origin of the authorship.

• Revise your undetectable essay by inputting your personal writing style and ideas.

• Run your finished work through an AI detector and revise until the AI score is zero.

AI tools may be controversial at the moment but with 89% of students doing the same thing as you've decided to do, you can't be blamed for using tools this easy for work that really doesn't make a difference. If you're considering using AI to write complete essays for more serious works like research papers or journals, my advice is to just do the work.