20% of academic texts are written with the help of Ia

Italian universities are increasingly oriented towards using artificial intelligence. So much so that today 20% of academic texts contain long passages, at least 25 consecutive sentences, generated by AI. Dissertations, articles, reports are increasingly being written with the help of technology, which becomes a co-author.

This is what emerged from a survey involving 50 national universities with the examination of over 200,000 documents. The survey was conducted by NoPlagio.it, the international platform for the prevention of plagiarism and the detection of texts generated by artificial intelligence, which is present in 140 countries, has more than six million users and is mainly used by students, researchers and university lecturers.

The research examined documents using eleven variables (including language, year of publication, document length) and found the percentage of sentences generated by Ia. It also showed how the use of the technology, which ten years ago was isolated, fragmented and residual, has practically exploded in the last year, between 2024 and 2025, when the average percentage of consecutive sentences exceeded 11% (in 2015, it was 0.1%). Particularly in the first half of this year, almost every second document examined showed at least one passage written with the help of generative tools.

'We are witnessing a real cultural change,' says Nazim Tchagapsov, CEO of NoPlagio. 'What was a novelty until recently is becoming the norm. Artificial intelligence does not replace the author, but works alongside him, helping to make writing faster and more accurate'. Not that the use of technology is homogeneous within the university world. The large traditional universities show more caution and appear more reluctant to resort to Ia than the telematic universities, which have a widespread use approach to writing processes. With differences that also concern the disciplines of study, the policies of each individual university, and the habits of students and researchers.