I’ve been using Microsoft Word for a long time, and came across Scrivner a little while ago and LOVE the features. I’ve just started University, and they use something called Turnitin. This is widely used across the education sector to check work for plagiarism.
The issue is, it checks metadata such as editing time. When I export my scriv to word to hand in my essay/assignment, in the eyes of the tutor/turnitin I have spent 0 minutes creating the word doc which flags my essay as potential plagerism, like I’ve just copy pasted it from an LLM instead of spending hours on making it.
I would love to use Scrivener as my main word processor for my essays, assignments and thesis but not having this feature renders it almost impossible to use the product. Is there any way we could implement this feature, so when you export the document it retains the edit time in the metadata?
Just leave the file open in the Word for a few hours. If you want, you can make some small changes, but that’s not necessary. The Word’s editing time metadata is calculating the time a file is open in it, not actual time you do something with it. If you are afraid that you run out of time, create a blank document and leave it open while you work ion the tea content and copy & paste the text to it once you are ready.
Hi, thanks for your response. Seems quite innificent to be honest, having to leave the document open for hours? Am I supposed to finish 8 hours before the submission date, then open it, leave for 8 hours? What about my thesis do I finish it months before hand then leave it open for months? I appreciate your suggestion, but implementing the feature seems to be the only viable solution, or just use word.
Or talk to a human and say “I use Word because that’s the format you require, but my writing is done outside the program.”
It’s not on you to prove that AI checkers are accurate (they aren’t) and Metadata checks on a Word file is so braindead that it makes my frontal lobe seize up. Maybe an addendum to every essay can be a page of your timestamps?
Or, as the other comment suggested, just leave it open. Heck, leave it open for days. If that’s the silly game you must play, then go all in. “Yes, I started this essay one week before it was assigned.”
I’m envisioning a dorm-based marketplace of students selling “pre aged” documents, like some modern day forger attempting to layer centuries on a new canvas with tea and soil.
My advice is to push back a little. It’s not on you that a bad tool makes bad assumptions. Get the writing done.
Hi.
Scrivener doesn’t keep track of time.
There is a writing history, though. I reports word count fluctuations per day.
If that is enough, I guess you could include a screenshot of it (or the history file itself) with your final document.
I don’t know if your proposal is viable because a document exported from Scrivener is the sum of many independent documents. I don’t know if Scrivener could store the editing time for each document or how that time could be applied to the overall exported document.
Since it is unfair to reject a work due to its editing time, in the event that you are punished for it, if I were you, I would choose to manipulate time using a program that allows modifying metadata. As we say in Spanish: “quien hace la ley hace la trampa”. Translated, not literally: “Every law has a / its loophole”.
I use comments and occasionally annotations in Scrivener. Those by default include a date and time and the words inside the comment. You go to File > Export > Comments and Annotations and comes out as a word file. This would show times that you were working on the document to prove this was not generated by AI . Here is a snapshot of this.
Both the dates, times and volume would show you did not create this with AI. (Now this involves a book written and edited over 7-8 months and this is a small fraction. (the unnamed comments are from my Editor)
But this would be a reasonable proof of work spread out and yes someone could make up 50 comments with times and spacing, but if you do, then you deserve to pull it off.
The Export is quick and easy.
Yeah, an interesting conundrum. Leica have started putting content authentication metadata in the photos from some of their cameras to help prove the pics aren’t AI generated (useful when you make cameras beloved of photojournalists). Maybe we’re going to get to a world where the same kind of thing will be needed for word processing apps… but the reality is that anything you can put in a file to say it’s legit will be faked when it’s important enough. (And if it’s important enough to protect, it’s important enough to fake).
Maybe we’ll go back to requiring exams for everything. It’s not like coursework hasn’t always been subject to huge cheating risk. What does a professor care if you cheat on your physics paper by using AI or by asking your good pal Steve Hawking?
Just adding my two cents. I’m in grad school now and we don’t use the standard submissions process but in my undergrad we used TurnItIn for every assignment. I also compiled from Scrivener into Word in order to submit them and never had any issues with it.
It’s possible the system has changed in the last couple of years on how it functions but I never had any flags or anything from doing my work that way.
Scrivener stores the “Creation” and “Modified” date for each sub-document, and that information is accessible via the Outline. You can use appropriate placeholders – see the list in the Help menu – to get that information into the Compiled document.
I agree with the other people in the thread, though, that this is not Scrivener’s problem to solve.
I think your anxiety is misplaced. You can see why a zero edit time would be a feature of interest and hence why TurnItIn might collect and report it. But a flag does not an indictment make; it is just a datapoint. I feel confident that no one was ever collared for plagiarism on this basis alone and neither will you be.
