Grammarly enters the AI content war with a new anti-cheating tool

Popular editing software Grammarly is entering the ongoing AI content war with a tool called Authorship, which provides granular details on what portions of an author’s work are AI-generated or edited.

Authorship will be available for beta testing in Google Docs for all Grammarly customers starting in September 2024 and available in Microsoft Word and Pages by the end of 2024.

Grammarly offers a free editing service, but charges $12 per month for more advanced features, such as altering the tone of content, checking for plagiarism, and AI-powered text generation.

What Authorship does is provide an extremely detailed breakdown of a given text, showing which words the author wrote versus which words were apparently copied from an external source. Authorship uses AI to differentiate between words that are original, edited via AI, cut and pasted from another site, or even flagged as “unnatural typing pattern.”

But is this what people want? According to the teachers and administrators I’ve spoken to, it’s not. They don’t want to deal with all of that. Instead, they just want an overarching conclusion as to whether a given paper was generated using AI. And since they haven’t yet found a suitable solution, they’ve stopped using them altogether.

Bill Vacca, director of instructional technology at Mohonasen Central School District in New York, said that he hasn’t found any qualified AI checkers. “You can’t, really,” Vacca said, of using AI checking sites to make a bulletproof ruling. “It’s hard to determine. And that’s when we realized that it’s not as simple as we thought it would be.”

Authorship recognizes that some of a student’s paper might be original while other parts might be copied, generated with AI, or edited. It’s a realistic viewpoint, even if it isn’t a simple one.

Grammarly says that Authorship was created with this in mind. “This lack of clarity has contributed to an overreliance on imperfect AI detection tools, leading to an adversarial back-and-forth between professors and students when papers are flagged as AI-generated,” said Jenny Maxwell, Head of Grammarly for Education, in a statement. “What’s missing in the market is a tool that can facilitate a productive conversation about the role of AI in education.”

Will Authorship be that tool? Teachers have told me that they just want to teach and not play AI cop. For those who want to dig deeper, though, Authorship could provide a more sophisticated perspective.

Correction: Grammarly’s Premium plan, which unlocks the new AI features, is $12/mo, rather than $15/mo as originally stated.