mementomori.social
penworks (@penworks@mementomori.social)
It is dispiriting that we have finally reached the point where the pariah that is TurnItIn, the veritable trojan horse of extractive data farming edtech capitalism, is now blatantly telling universities that all student work will be used for their (proprietary, for profit) AI 'training' data. That they have been using student work for their search bot training for decades is now besides the point. That TurnItIn never had any purpose other than to convince academics it would help prevent plagiarism - when it does nothing of the sort, is now only a side issue. My own former employer circulated detailed notifications to staff about TurnItIn not being suitable for building plagiarism cases, so what was it for? Nothing. It was for nothing. Yet the uptake of TurnItIn in education is vast. https://calmatters.org/education/higher-education/2025/06/ai-detector/ So only now, even after so much time and valuable teaching expertise has been thrown down the toilet of extractive data farming, does HE finally wake up to their responsibility and criticise all the pointless monopolised SaaS that they pay to use yet get nothing out of. No one was willing to break the mould and say hang on - why don't we just stop using this crap? Everyone dressed it up as 'learning' for students. That seeing a similarity score was somehow going to make a student write a better essay. The fact that WONKHE have cottoned on to the fact that student work is owned by Turnitin is rather astonishing. It has always required “perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable and sublicensable” rights to student writing. Thats a long way of putting "we own everything you give us" - just like Facebook. Are people in denial, or just dumb? It's a good question. I have various email threads from a well known learning edtech community that discuss how they use TurnItIn. Should they all have been doing something a lot more worthwhile? probably. How much money was thrown at TurnitIn for the pleasure of then donating all student work for free? https://wonkhe.com/blogs/a-supplier-shouldnt-be-able-to-rewrite-who-owns-students-essays All academic writing is notoriously broken, has been for a very long time. I can never understand why any of this is permitted to carry on. The bottomless pit of public money and resources (staff time, training, research etc etc) donated freely to extractive companies who expect payment as well as all the free writing content and review. 'AI' will not help you. It will destroy it all. **More links** https://gradeforuni.com/turnitin-ai-student-essays-uk/ https://wordpress.aber.ac.uk/e-learning/2026/10/05/turnitin-statement/ https://www.ics.ai/post/ucisa-2026-ai-higher-education-insights https://www.turnitin.com/press/advance-to-acquire-turnitin https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2019/06/28/automating-mistrust/ #academia #academicchatter #ai #turnitin
