By Niamh McAuley, LUSU Education Officer 2026/27
You may have seen the news regarding Turnitin - there's has been quite a lot.
Where did it all start?
After being sent an article from Times Higher Education regarding Southampton's move away from Turnitin due to a new end user agreement, lots of officers and I took notice.
After hearing about this I took to my own social media platform to inform students on the changes, from this I was quoted in a BBC Article adding to the conversation nationally.
At Lancaster University, Students' Union education officer Niamh McAuley said in a video on social media, external that she was due to hold discussions with the university with the aim of stopping students' work being used to train AI.
She told students: "Your work should belong to you and you should fundamentally make decisions whether it's being used." Source: BBC News
What is Turnitin?
Turnitin has a massive monopoly share of the higher education (HE) sector when it comes to assessment software. So, any changes to this agreement have a massive effect on students across the whole of the UK.
Lancaster uses Turnitin as its main layer of detection and plagiarism software which all work submitted by students goes through.
What’s the new agreement?
Within this new user agreements, it was detailed how with the introduction of AI tools across the whole platform meant that data used from user submissions would be used to train these, alongside AI detection software. This is very concerning. Students should own their work and determine if it is fed into these machines.
Universities and SU officers across the UK are beginning to move away from Turnitin with concerns regarding intellectual property. If students work is being used to train AI tools, it is putting their intellectual property at risk of being used without their consent.
'Turnitin has added a new section on AI tools. By using the platform, instructors consent to Turnitin processing their input in the Services for current AI tools and for improving or developing AI Tools and other products, features, or services.' Source: Customer FAQs – Important update to the Turnitin End-User License Agreement
This section of the of Turnitin's FAQs indicates how students work will be used:
“Q7: How does Turnitin use data to train AI models?
A: Only Turnitin Originality data is used to train AI models. If your institution does not want submissions to be processed for AI writing detection, they can opt out by disabling AI writing detection from their admin account settings page. Our model is trained on a representative sample of data spread over a period of time, that includes both AI generated and authentic academic writing across geographies and subject areas. While creating our sample dataset, we also took into account statistically under-represented groups like second-language learners, English users from non-English speaking countries, students at colleges and universities with diverse enrolments, and less common subject areas such as anthropology, geology, sociology, and others to minimize bias when training our model.” Source: Customer FAQs – Important update to the Turnitin End-User License Agreement
What have I done?
From all these concerns being raised, I met with Professor Louise Dixon (the new PVC Education) to discuss the feelings of students, as well as those of staff. The University, alongside the Students’ Union, are concerned regarding these changes. The University is part of the lobbying group UCISA (Universities and colleges information Systems Association). Through this group, the University are working collaboratively with other universities to lobby Turnitin.
As it stands, these changes have been postponed until July 2027.
I stressed the importance of communication to staff and students when discussing with Louise, from this a joint statement regarding the current stance went out on the Portal in October.
I've also been working alongside other officers from the NUS, York, Southampton, and Sussex and will be meeting with the CEO of Turnitin in November.
