Grammarly recently launched Grammarly Authorship, a new feature designed to track the provenance of writing and guard against unauthorized AI use or more traditional forms of plagiarism.
As an educator, I’ve seen classes plagued by AI submissions, so I was eager to test the tool, which is currently available through the free Grammarly plugin in Google Docs and on Grammarly for Chrome and Microsoft Edge, and is scheduled to be rolled out to other Grammarly platforms in the future.
Unlike most other AI detection tools, Grammarly Authorship is meant to be used by the writer, not a teacher assessing the writing later. Essentially, Grammarly Authorship acts as a beefed-up version of Google Doc’s “version history.” The tool tracks how long you spend in the document and how the writing originates: whether the user typed it or copied and pasted it.
Authorship can also sometimes tell where text was copied and pasted from, and will flag text it believes is AI-generated, as well as track use of Grammarly’s traditional spellcheck. All this information is provided in a sharable report that also tracks how long a piece of writing took the user and whether they wrote it over multiple sessions.
After using the tool for a week with various writing projects, I’m impressed overall. I see several potential beneficial uses for teachers and students, and unexpectedly, I find the tool useful for tracking how long 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, this is, sadly, not yet a panacea that will free instructors from AI-submitted work. Grammarly Authorship, although a definite step in the right direction, still has some of the same limitations of existing AI detection tools.
What Grammarly Authorship Does Well
Grammarly Authorship works as advertised: If you turn it on, it will track your activity and provide insights into how much was typed in the document vs. copied and pasted in, etc.
In my tests, the tool correctly ID’d the material I had typed into the document, the AI-generated text I added as a test, and quotes I had copied and pasted from another document. It didn’t acknowledge that these copied-and-pasted elements were within quotation marks and cited, which would be preferred. That said, a teacher could notice the copied-and-pasted portions flagged and then quickly look to see that these were properly quoted and attributed.
It’s not hard to see how a student worried about being falsely accused of AI cheating might use it as a protection mechanism. Additionally, students can use it to see exactly what parts of their papers need citations and where maybe their paraphrasing didn’t go far enough. It might also inspire a student to rewrite AI-generated text and make it their own, which may not be an ideal outcome but would at least involve some more writing practice.
Because of these features, I understand why a teacher might consider requiring students to use Grammarly Authorship, provided their institution vetted its privacy settings and permitted it. Doing so would create a paper trail for each writing assignment that could serve both the teacher and student in conversations about plagiarism and AI use.
Despite this potential, however, I wouldn’t personally require students to use Authorship even it was vetted by my institution for reasons I’ll discuss more below.
Grammarly Authorship’s Limitations
Despite its many great features, the AI detection portion of Grammarly Authorship will be subject to the same ethical concerns as other AI detection tools. Since AI detection tools are never 100 percent accurate, these can and have led to damaging false accusations of AI use.
Authorship flags text as copied and pasted into the document as well as being AI-generated, which can help somewhat, so a teacher might ask a student where these three paragraphs that were copied and pasted came from rather than accusing the student of AI use. However, a savvy student (and students who use AI are often savvy), might just generate AI text then type it into their document that Authorship is checking. In that case, even though the work will be flagged as AI-generated, the student will have a document showing that they spent a significant amount of time typing their paper — thereby potentially falsely indicating they wrote it.
These misgivings aside, I believe it’s likely that requiring students to use Authorship would cut back on some AI use. It’s harder to type out an AI-generated answer than simply copying and pasting it.
More to the point, I wouldn’t personally require students to use this type of tool. I’m comfortable with Grammarly tracking my writing, but I’m not with requiring others to be tracked in the same manner. 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 cuts down on those preferences. Maybe a student likes to write as an email draft or in their phone’s notetaking app, and then copy and paste it, or even dictate initial text through a preferred voice-to-text product. Authorship would prevent those methods of writing.
Would I Use Authorship With Students?
Even though I wouldn’t require it, I would recommend Grammarly Authorship to students, provided my institution approved the app. As stated above, I think it can be a helpful plagiarism checker that students can use to assess their own work. It can also show them how much time they put into writing. For example, if they didn’t get the grade they wanted, maybe they would realize that they needed to spend more than a half-hour on an assignment next time.
That being said, I would not require students to share their Authorship reports with me, and would, in fact, discourage it. In other words, I think it’s helpful 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 on continuing to use it for my writing and will recommend it to fellow educators for personal use. While I don’t think Grammarly Authorship answers the question of what we’re going to do about AI use in writing classes, I do like that Grammarly is exploring AI use in a way that seeks to protect human writing.
For the record, according to my Authorship report, this story was 100% typed by a human, with 2% Grammarly’s traditional grammar correction use and 0% AI-generated content.