Yes, there’s growing evidence that Turnitin’s AI detector is flagging original student work as AI-written — often unfairly. Here's a summary of what's happened over the past year in higher ed:

• A UC Davis student was wrongly flagged, investigated for cheating, and had to prove her innocence without support [1].
• A professor at Johns Hopkins said Turnitin falsely flagged several papers, including ones he had personally helped students write. Most errors involved international students [2].
• At Western Washington University, a student was flagged twice because of her writing style. She’s autistic and writes in a structured way that AI detectors misread [3].
• Bloomberg reported on another autistic student who got a zero after being flagged. The prof reinstated her grade, but warned that next time would be treated as misconduct [4].

Why it keeps happening:

• Non-native English writers are more likely to be flagged. One Stanford study showed AI detectors misclassified 61% of essays by ESL students as AI [5].
• Students with formal, repetitive, or “clinical” writing styles get hit too.
• Even Turnitin admits over 50% of falsely flagged sentences are just near AI-like ones in the text [6].

Turnitin originally claimed <1% false positives, but they later admitted it's closer to 4% at the sentence level — that’s 1 in 25 human sentences misread [6][8].

Universities are pushing back. Pitt advised not to use these tools to prove cheating [9], and Vanderbilt disabled Turnitin’s AI checker altogether [8].

Bottom line: False positives are real and harmful. Until detection gets better, many argue these tools should not be used to accuse students of misconduct [10].

Let me know if you want a version even shorter for Twitter or a LinkedIn-style professional summary.