How to document your writing process if an AI detector flags you

First, what to do and not do

1. Stay calm and ask for specifics. Ask which tool produced the score, what the report shows, and which policy is being applied. Ask to see the report itself.
2. Do not delete or rewrite anything. Do not "fix" the flagged text, and do not edit timestamps or rebuild a history. Altered evidence is worse than missing evidence.
3. Save everything as it is now. Download a copy of the document and export or screenshot the version history before anyone, including you, changes it.
4. Write down your own account while you still remember it: when you started, where you wrote, which sources you used, and whether any AI tool touched the work, even for grammar or brainstorming. Be accurate about that last point.
5. Ask for a conversation. Turnitin's own guidance for instructors is to use the information to initiate a conversation, not to draw a conclusion, and to ask a student to explain the work, the process they followed and their key takeaways. That post also links a guide on handling false positives written for students.

What counts as evidence

Evidence	What it shows	Limits
Version history (Google Docs; other word processors keep similar histories)	A timeline of edits and who made them	Needs edit permission to view; revisions can be merged; deleting history is permanent
Writing replay or authorship report (for example Grammarly Authorship)	Typed text versus pasted text, with a replay of editing	Off by default, so only exists if you switched it on before writing; not 100 percent accurate
Notes, outlines, mind maps, handwritten pages	How the ideas developed	Easy to dispute if they are undated
Earlier drafts and file timestamps	Progress over days or weeks	Timestamps can be changed, so earlier cloud copies count for more
Sources, highlights, browser history	What you read, and when	Can be incomplete or private
An oral walk-through of the work	You understand the argument and choices	Depends on the reader's willingness to listen

Google's help page on finding what changed in a file explains the mechanics: open the document, choose Last edit at the top right, and you can view or restore earlier versions. You need permission to edit the file to browse its history, you can name up to 40 versions in a document, and Google notes that revisions may occasionally be merged. Deleting version history is permanent, so avoid cleaning it up.

Using a writing replay

Grammarly's Authorship documentation describes a report with three parts: analytics on typed versus sourced text and time spent, a colour-coded copy of the text, and a replay of typing and editing from start to finish. Some facts that matter before you rely on it:

• Tracking is off by default in Google Docs and Word. If you did not turn it on, nothing was recorded, and you cannot add it later.
• Clipboard access is needed for the tool to say where pasted text came from. Without it, pasted text is listed as copied from an unknown source.
• The page itself says it may not capture every case accurately, and the Word version has a 20 page limit after which tracked history may become unreliable.
• When you share a report, the reader can see your edits, the names of websites you copied from and your prompts to AI tools. You can exclude the replay when sharing.
• The data is kept on Grammarly's servers for up to 10 years.

No such tool is proof either, but a continuous record that matches your account is hard to dismiss.

How to present it

1. Put the evidence in one folder: the final document, the version history export, notes and drafts, a short dated timeline in your own words.
2. Write two or three paragraphs, factual and non-defensive: what you did, in what order, with which sources, and what tools you used.
3. Point to what a detector can and cannot show. OpenAI said its own classifier should not be used as a primary decision-making tool and was unreliable on short texts. The Stanford study of non-native writers found detectors misclassified non-native English writing as AI-generated. If either applies to you, say so once, plainly.
4. Offer to explain any passage out loud. If you can talk through your argument, your sources and why you changed a paragraph, that is strong evidence on its own.
5. Ask what the appeal process is, and keep copies of everything you send.

If you used AI for part of it

Say so, and say how. Be specific: brainstorming, grammar suggestions, a paragraph rewrite. If your course or employer permits that use, it is not a problem. If it does not, an honest account now is better than one that unravels later. Do not run the text through a rewriting tool to lower the score: that changes the evidence and does not answer the question. We cover that in what an AI humanizer is and when using one is honest.

For next time

Switch on version history or a replay tool before you start, name a version at each milestone, keep a dated notes file, and save sources as you go. Our explanation of how detectors work shows why short and formulaic work is flagged more often, and the threads on non-native writers and on whether teachers can rely on detectors cover what other members have been through.