Loughborough University is committed to a rigorous, fair and transparent treatment of academic integrity.
As an institution we use tools provided by Turnitin for assessment and feedback and plagiarism detection support. Recently Turnitin proposed changes to its End User License Agreement (EULA) that included new terms governing data processing for generative AI.
This proposal raised significant concerns across the Higher Education community regarding the potential use of student work, uploaded to Turnitin, being used to train generative AI.
The collective concern has been fed back to Turnitin and has resulted in a pause to the proposed EULA changes and assurances from Turnitin that it does not use student work to train generative AI / Large Language Models (LLMs).
Loughborough University welcomes Turnitin’s response. We recognise the importance of the issues raised to our student and academic staff communities. We do not allow student work to be used to train Large Language Models and related systems and any change in this position would only be considered after a thorough and robust consultation process.
The full statement from Turnitin can be read below:
We recognise the great responsibility that comes with our customers’ trust to protect their data, which we have prioritised for nearly 30 years. We acknowledge that the introduction of AI in education raised new questions and concerns about data use and privacy. We are committed to being transparent around AI product design and data use. You can learn more about our approach to building AI tools in our AI design principles and we will soon be releasing a comprehensive trust centre, which will include full detail. Students can have confidence that Turnitin has never used student papers to train generative AI models (LLM’s) and there are no plans to change that.