RTL: More than half of master’s theses contain AI-generated text

Almost 60 per cent of master’s theses from the past year were (partly) written by a chatbot, according to research by RTL Nieuws. In some cases, AI wrote more than half of the text.

RTL Nieuws analysed hundreds of master’s theses from twelve universities. Only Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Maastricht University are missing from the study, because their theses are not online.

Traces of generative AI were found in 59 per cent of the theses examined. In 14 per cent, more than half of the text came from a chatbot, and in 6 per cent the thesis appeared to have been written almost entirely by AI.

Last week, the Amsterdam university newspaper Folia published a similar study. The newspaper used Pangram to examine bachelor’s theses from the Faculty of Economics and Business. It found that (parts of) 48 of the 50 bachelor’s theses had been written by AI.

Fraud

Some students told RTL that they still consider themselves the authors of their thesis, despite using AI. “For me, they are my thoughts. They are in there. Not facts a chatbot wants to put in”, said one of them. Others deny having used AI.

Education minister Rianne Letschert describes it as fraud when a student has a thesis written entirely by AI. She says institutions should consider whether they are checking for this adequately.

Pangram

RTL analysed the texts using the AI tool Pangram, a detection programme that can identify patterns more commonly used by chatbots. Pangram can recognise texts written by, for example, Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini.

According to scientists, Pangram is cautious in its assessments: it detects fewer than half of texts written entirely by AI. The tool was previously used to find traces of AI in hundreds of posts by Prime Minister Rob Jetten. Education minister Letschert has also sometimes used AI in a speech.

Not complete

The study did not analyse the theses in their entirety. RTL scanned 3,000 words each time, the news organisation writes. Master’s theses are generally between ten thousand and twenty thousand words long.