Barnes and Noble Education Launches AI Content Detector on Bartleby

Student Brands, a BNED company, releases AI content detector to help educators detect essays written by AI writing tools

Barnes & Noble Education, Inc. (NYSE: BNED), a leading solutions provider for the education industry, today announced the launch of IdentifAI™️, a free AI content detector. The tool is currently in beta and will be available via bartleby^® Write’s online platform later this month.

Student Brands™️, a BNED company, developed IdentifAI to detect human versus bot-generated text. In initial testing, the tool accurately identified AI writing approximately 90% of the time. The Student Brands team has tested it against popular text generators, including ChatGPT, WriteSonic, Quillbot and Jasper.

“At Student Brands and Barnes and Noble Education, we believe that AI can awaken a student’s critical thinking skills, but it should not become a substitute for thinking itself,” said Sudhir Krishnaswamy, CTO of Barnes and Noble Education DSS and CEO of Student Brands. “As large language models become more prevalent, we want to ensure that educators and students are provided AI detection tools as part of the bartleby Write service in addition to the plagiarism and grammar detection that they know and love.”

IdentifAI uses perplexity to measure the level of predictability of what is being written, looking at sentence structure and how consistent the text is. This approach allows the tool to detect if the text is generated by a machine or written by a human. Users can paste up to 1,000 words at a time into the IdentifAI tool, and all text detected as AI-written is instantly highlighted.

“Certain tools like ChatGPT that write full essays for students are not conducive in helping them learn and makes it difficult as an English professor to understand if my students are truly grasping the concepts I’m teaching,” said Dr. Erin Presley, Associate Professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University. “Having a free AI detection tool to quickly and easily check my students’ writing helps me understand if they used an AI generator or are doing the work themselves.”

To ensure Student Brands is creating state-of-the-art AI tools that will help students learn, the company has compiled an experienced AI-team to work on its “Content Brain™️” technology. The multi-disciplinary group of AI-experts includes team members that have worked in gaming, instructional design, news, social media, content, scientific research and big data.

In addition to the IdentifAI tool being announced today, the Content Brain™️ team is working on a new AI tool that harnesses the power of large language models and GPT3 to help guide a student through their own writing journey. The goal of the AI-powered tool in development, is to teach students to be better writers by helping them fully explore the various facets of a writing topic and providing them with suggestions for where they may have missed a critical point.

The tool will offer a writing experience that starts with an essay prompt and a blank page, and provide guidance toward alternate ways of saying something without offering up paraphrased text. It will provide human- and AI-written plagiarism checks, coverage analysis through intents, and suggestions that a particularly opinionated piece of writing be supported by a citation.

The AI tool in development is scheduled to be released in the Fall of 2023.

For more information about IdentifAI, visit the current beta at: https://www.bartleby.com/write/ai-checker

ABOUT STUDENT BRANDS

Student Brands is an education technology company that operates multiple direct-to-student businesses focused on Study Tools, Writing Help and Literary Research. Student Brands currently manages 20+ websites and mobile apps in 10+ countries. Students Brands was acquired by Barnes & Noble Education, Inc. in 2017, and operates as part of the Barnes and Noble Education DSS business.

ABOUT BARNES & NOBLE EDUCATION, INC.

Barnes & Noble Education, Inc. (NYSE: BNED) is a leading solutions provider for the education industry, driving affordability, access and achievement at hundreds of academic institutions nationwide, and ensuring millions of students are equipped for success in the classroom and beyond. Through its family of brands, BNED offers campus retail services and academic solutions, a digital direct-to-student learning ecosystem, wholesale capabilities and more. BNED is a company serving all who work to elevate their lives through education, supporting students, faculty and institutions as they make tomorrow a better, more inclusive and smarter world. For more information, visit www.bned.com.

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