Guaranteed Originality: Is Quillbot's Plagiarism-Removal Expertise Bulletproof?

QuillBot is a great rewriter and sidekick that will help you polish your text. It’s most famous for its best-in-class paraphrasing feature. As a result, one of the frequent questions from users is whether their QuillBot spinoffs will bypass plagiarism and AI-written checks.

The short answer is yes. If that’s your target, you can use QuillBot to outsmart AI detection, write successful spin-offs, and remove plagiarism. This being said, when you’re trying to pass plagiarized content, there is always a risk of being caught.

QuillBot was not intended as a tool that would help students cheat on assignments or content writers get a pass on producing original content. Instead, it’s an AI thesaurus that understands context. That’s the product guarantee on the label. Don’t expect to write an angry review if it fails at something it’s not intended to do.

The market for spin-off text

There are two prime types of users who are eyeing QuillBot for its spin-off capabilities:

Website managers who would love to automate content

Content drives sales for a lot of businesses. Well-written, consistent content, published at regular intervals, triggers Google to notice and recommend your website. A lot of businesses are looking to automate their writing. Brainstorming, generating ideas, and crafting engaging articles or blog posts is a time consuming and expensive process. If there is a cheaper, faster way that gets them the same results, they are going to be the first to use it.

Students who are overwhelmed with assignments

They want to deliver their homework without hassle. Elon Musk was the first to say what every student out there was probably thinking: "AI is the end of homework". A combination of ChatGPT, QuillBot, and the paper of your nerdy best friend can make it so that you never have to put pen to paper again.

An Ethical Lecturing

Plagiarism is going to push the fairness button for a lot of creators out there. How are we supposed to feel about people who can copy someone’s work and bypass detection completely?

The truth is, in both cases, people have been writing spin-offs by hand long before AIs came along, with various degrees of success. In the end, either the Google algorithm or a teacher will judge the quality of your paraphrased text. Generally speaking, QuillBot is as good as you make it.

Google’s approach to AI-generated content

Google has published its stance on AI-generated content since February 2023.

"Google's ranking systems aim to reward original, high-quality content that demonstrates qualities of what we call E-E-A-T: expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness," the article explains. "Using AI doesn't give content any special gains. It's just content. If it is useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of E-E-A-T, it might do well in Search. If it doesn't, it might not."

As long as the automated content is well-written and original, Google is happy to rank it, regardless of where it comes from.

Quillbot and other paraphrase tools have an indirect effect on search engine results. The paraphrasing feature can help you create content that reads as unique. Google's algorithm places a strong emphasis on original, high-quality content. Simply paraphrasing existing content without adding value doesn’t automatically improve your rankings.

Google’s browser is sophisticated and immensely intelligent. In nine out of ten cases, the algorithm is smart enough to rank the most relevant article on the first page. I don’t expect AI-written articles and paraphrasers to change that. Google will likely continue to recognize well-written content, whether automated or not. Part of it is the originality aspect. If the market gets smarter at plagiarizing content, I expect Google will become smarter at identifying plagiarism.

Is this the dream tool for wholesale homework?

A lot of schools already have a no-AI policy. They certainly have multiple policies against plagiarism.

Teachers who are trying to uphold this policy most likely run essays through Turnitin, the top-of-the-line plagiarism-detection software. The detector will scan your essay against a large database to find similarities and identify plagiarism attempts. It’s a game of cat and mouse.

Turnitin doesn’t automatically flag QuillBot-generated content as plagiarism because QuillBot doesn't just copy and regurgitate existing material. Instead, it suggests alternative phrasing and structures while keeping the original meaning intact. It means Turnitin can’t exactly match it to similar content in its database. No, this frequently used tool won’t be able to tell on you.

Before you get too excited, here's the thing you need to understand: in order for your text to be able to Bypass plagiarism, it needs a lot of changes. The more changes you make, the more alien your text will sound. There is a point where you might paraphrase so much that humans will easily mark your text as, at least, very weird.

Quillbot doesn’t always paraphrase every segment of your writing

QuillBot can leave some sections as they are or make insufficient changes, especially when you paraphrase wholesale. This can tip off Turnitin. Once a few phrases are identified, it’s not that difficult for your teacher to unravel the rest of your paper.

On rare occasions, QuillBot can change the meaning of your text

Even if Turnitin doesn’t identify your text as plagiarized or AI-written, a human might feel the awkwardness of paraphrasing. Yes, you can test well on your plagiarism score on Turnitin and still get caught.

QuillBot is excellent at polishing your writing, but will occasionally churn out phrases that don’t make perfect sense. Although it does a good job as a contextual paraphraser, QuillBot can sometimes miss the original meaning. This happens when the original text is especially flavorful, when you use a more creative setting, or when you dial synonyms to the highest setting.

Tools are evolving to identify AI-written text and plagiarism

There is obviously a market for tools that identify plagiarism, so I expect it won’t be long until better plagiarism detection comes out. AIs are not in their final form.

If you are writing one of your high-stakes papers, be especially rigorous when attributing sources. Diplomas and degrees can be revoked for plagiarism, even years after the fact. Jobs can be lost, and lawsuits can ensue.

With new tools being developed, spinoffs will not remain that difficult to detect in the future, even if they pass their plagiarism test today. I would advise anyone to use QuillBot with caution at work, especially in high-stakes research papers or assignments.