The Best AI Detection Tools to Catch Cheating and Plagiarism
Credit: Image Credit: Carol Yepes / Moment / Getty Images- Years after ChatGPT’s release, colleges nationwide are implementing it in their syllabi and even creating degrees in the emerging artificial intelligence fields.
- Several companies, including companies that work to advance AI, have created free and paid AI detection tools for writing, photography, and audio content.
- Although none of the tools are foolproof, they can be used to feel out whether a piece of text was written by a human or a robot.
As artificial intelligence (AI) reaches deeper and deeper into everyday life, its impacts are acute in higher education where students and professors are embracing, banning, and designing education around AI-generated text and media.
AI text, photo, video, and audio detection tools are locked in a constant battle to evolve as AI does. Educators and students can use these tools to see how much of the content they’re reading or seeing is made by a computer or a human and decide how to address it. No detector is foolproof, so a human should use any analysis as a support to determine whether something is AI-generated, not the sole source.
Here’s what students need to know about the latest AI detection tools.
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AI Text Detection Tools
Turnitin’s AI Detection Model
Detects: GPT-4, GPT-4o, Gemini (Pro), Llama
Who Can Access: Educators
Features
Turnitin breaks down papers into portions of a couple hundred words and overlaps them to see each sentence in context. The model then scores between zero (generated by AI) and one (written by a human).
According to Turnitin, the tool should be used as a data tool for educators to make informed decisions about AI usage based on academic and institutional policies—not as the sole basis of decisions.
GPTZero
- Detects: ChatGPT, Gemini, Llama, Claude
Who Can Access: Anyone; free basic AI detection and paid tiered access
Features
GPTZero’s AI text detection tool accepts text, documents, PDFs, and image files using a sentence-by-sentence classification model. It gives users a score of how confident it is that an AI wrote the text and another score of how much it thinks an AI or a human wrote the text.
GPTZero boasts 99% accuracy and integrates with Google Classroom and Google Docs.
Winston AI Detection
- Detects: ChatGPT, GPT-4o, Gemini, Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Bing Image Creator
Who Can Access: Anyone; fourteen day trial and paid tiered access
Features
Winston AI’s detector lets users know the odds that a human wrote the copy. The software also detects plagiarism on a percentage scale from 0-100 and a sentence-by-sentence assessment of the text. It lists duplicate text found online with printable reports available.
Their Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology extracts text from scanned documents, including handwritten text. The tool supports 10 languages and has a Chrome extension.
Copyleaks AI Content Detector
- Detects: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, Llama, Jasper, T5
Who Can Access: Anyone; free for up to 2,000 words, then paid tiers
Features
Copyleaks detects AI-generated text and source code and easily integrates with Google Docs and some of educators’ most popular learning management systems (LMS), including Canvas, Moodle, Brightspace, Blackboard, Schoology, and Sakai. The company’s products have military-grade security, GDPR compliance, and SOC 2 and SOC 3 certification.
It also has custom sensitivity levels, including one that detects AI-generated text that has gone through a text spinner or has been manipulated to avoid detection.
Want to learn about AI? Read more:
Originality.AI Chrome Extension
- Detects: GPT-4.1, GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5, Claude 3.7, DeepSeek
Who Can Access: Anyone; free Chrome extension; pay-as-you-go or paid tiers
Features
Originality.AI’s detection tool scans content and gives users a scale for readability and percentages of:
- How likely it is that AI wrote a text
- How true a text is
- How likely is the text to be plagiarized
- spelling and grammar correctness
The Chrome extension allows you to scan content quickly to see what’s AI, check content without copying or pasting, and even comes with a monitor that counts characters and gives you a chart of text over time.
Scribbr’s Free AI Detector
- Detects: ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot
Who Can Access: Anyone
Features
Scribbr’s AI detector requires no sign-up and lets anyone submit unlimited checks for free, up to 1,200 words per submission. Analyze six languages and see how much of your text was written by a human or AI.
Scribbr claims that the free tool peaked at 68% accuracy.
ZeroGPT
- Detects: ChatGPT, GPT-3, GPT-4, Gemini, Llama
Who Can Access: Anyone; free and paid tiers
Features
ZeroGPT’s AI detector supports all languages and highlights each sentence written by AI with a percentage of how much AI is in the text. The tool generates a PDF report for each submission for plagiarism-free proof. The detector is also available within messaging apps WhatsApp and Telegram, where users chat with the bots to detect AI, summarize, paraphrase, translate, and check grammar.
ZeroGPT also lets you upload more than one file at once.
AI Photo Detection Tools
AI or Not
- Detects: Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Flux, GPT-4o, Imagen, Face Swap, Lip Sync, GANs, DeepFaceLab, Reface, ElevenLabs, Boomy, Speechify, Udio, Suno, Kling, MiniMax, Veo, Runway, Sora, ChatGPT, Claude, Llama, Mistral, Grok
Who Can Access: Anyone; free and paid tiers
Features
AI or Not’s free tool detects text, AI images, and deepfakes, while the pro and enterprise tiers also detect AI in voice, music, and video. According to the site, it is 98.9% accurate. You can upload 10 images and 5,000 words of text per month for free.
Sightengine
- Detects: Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Ideogram, Flux, Bing Image Creator, GANs
Who Can Access: Anyone; free and paid tiers
Features
Sightengine’s photodetector lets users drag and drop images to see what percentage chance an AI created them and what type of program was used to make them. The free tier offers users 2,000 operations (operations differ by requests on an image) per month and one video stream.
You can also take a test to determine how accurate you are at determining whether an image is AI or not.
Decopy AI
- Detects: Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Flux
Who Can Access: Anyone
Features
Decopy AI’s 100% free tool requires no sign-up and gives users a percentage chance of an AI creating the image.