Sam Dickinson, union affairs officer at York Students’ Union, said students’ concerns were raised in August before Turnitin announced that any changes would not take place at least until September next year.
“The key issue here is that students’ intellectual property is something that should belong to them,” he explained.
“I think there’s a fear when AI policies are introduced like this that their work is going to be whisked away and used for something other than student progress at university.”
Dickinson said a falling number of graduate job vacancies, partly attributed to AI, contributed to “massive anxiety” among students.
Meanwhile, they were also concerned “more broadly that AI is being used to train services without the meaningful consent of the people who created that content”.
“If your university is using Turnitin and it’s using student-submitted work to train AI services, you can’t meaningfully consent to that because you have to submit your work to get marked,” he said.
“If you’re at university, if you’re writing about things you really, really care about, you should own that work and be able to decide whether it’s used to train AI services.”