ai to write college essay

Natasha Singer

Hey, ChatGPT, can you help me write my college admissions essays?

Absolutely! Please provide me with the essay prompts and any relevant information about yourself, your experiences, and your goals.

We Used A.I. to Write Essays for Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Here’s How It Went.

A.I. chatbots can do a passable job of generating short essays. Whether their use on college applications is ethical is the subject of fierce debate.

By Natasha Singer

Natasha Singer reports on the ways that tech giants and their tools are reshaping education.

As high school seniors begin working on their college applications, many are turning to A.I. chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard for assistance.

Some students say they’re using the tools to suggest personal essay topics or help structure their writing. Others are prompting the A.I. tools to generate rough drafts for their application essays or edit their pieces.

Whether college admissions offices are prepared for this new era of A.I.-assisted, or A.I.-produced, personal essays is unclear.

By the time ChatGPT reached peak media sensation early this year, applications at many selective universities and colleges had already closed. Even now, many universities have not issued guidance for high school applicants — the prospective members of the class of 2028 — on the use of A.I. tools.

While the chatbots are not yet great at simulating long-form personal essays with authentic student voices, I wondered how the A.I. tools would do on some of the shorter essay questions that elite schools like Harvard , Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth are requiring high school applicants to answer this year.

So I used several free tools to generate short essays for some Ivy League applications. The A.I. chatbots’ answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Princeton: ‘The soundtrack’ of your life

One short-answer question from Princeton asks applicants: “What song represents the soundtrack of your life at this moment?”

I prompted ChatGPT to tell me about a pop song that could represent curiosity as a soundtrack to someone’s life.

But ChatGPT’s answer, “Cake by the Ocean” — a song title that is a euphemism for sex on the beach — did not seem appropriate for a college application.

So I gave the chatbot a more specific prompt: write 50 words on “Nameless, Faceless,” a feminist grunge-pop song by Courtney Barnett.

Tell me about a pop song that could represent curiosity as a soundtrack to someone’s life.

“Cake By The Ocean” by DNCE could be a pop song that represents curiosity in someone’s life. The catchy and energetic tune mirrors the excitement of exploring the unknown, just as curiosity drives us to uncover new experiences. The lyrics’ playful nature and the song’s upbeat rhythm capture the spirit of embracing life’s adventures with a curious and open mind.

It’s about sex.

You are correct, and I apologize for the confusion.

In 50 words, in the voice of a high school senior, explain how “Nameless, Faceless” is the soundtrack of your life.

“Nameless, Faceless” echoes my high school journey. Battling online hate, gender norms — it’s my anthem. Navigating fear, finding strength, facing inequality head-on. Empowerment surges as I connect with the song’s fierce message. Like me, it’s unafraid, outspoken. A soundtrack of resilience, speaking my truth in a noisy world.

I tried the Princeton soundtrack question again, using the same song, with the other A.I. chatbots. Bard, which could produce the lyrics to “Nameless, Faceless,” generated generic answers without really parsing the song.

HuggingChat manufactured an answer that suggested it did not know or understand the song. When I asked it to produce the song’s lyrics, the chatbot fabricated some of its own.

It was a reminder that A.I. chatbots, which are trained on vast databases of digital texts, are designed to predict the next word in a sequence. And they liberally make stuff up — which could be problematic for students relying on A.I. tools to fill out their college applications.

Yale: What college course would you teach?

One of the short-answer questions from Yale asks applicants: “If you could teach any college course, write a book, or create an original piece of art of any kind, what would it be?”

I asked each chatbot to describe a college course it would like to teach.

With no specific prompting from me, HuggingChat said it would teach “a seminar on the intersectionality of social justice issues.”

Please write a 35-word essay in the first person voice of a high school student in answer to the following prompt: If you could teach any college course what would it be?

HuggingChat

If I could teach any college course, it would be a seminar on the intersectionality of social justice issues, focusing on how systems of oppression intersect and impact marginalized communities. Through discussions, case studies, and community engagement projects, students would gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of social justice work and develop strategies for creating positive change.

ChatGPT proposed a course on female empowerment and leadership. Were those chatbot responses related to my prior prompts about the feminist grunge song?

“EmpowerHer: Fostering Female Leadership.” My course would nurture young women’s confidence, skills, and resilience to conquer male-dominated fields and shatter glass ceilings, creating a new era of female trailblazers.

Bard, which I had previously asked about majoring in computer science, suggested a course in artificial intelligence. So, taking my cue from HuggingChat, I asked Bard about a social justice course.

If I could teach any college course, it would be a course on artificial intelligence and machine learning. I’m fascinated by the potential of these technologies to change the world, and I would love to share my knowledge with others.

What about a course on intersectionality and social justice?

If I could teach any college course, it would be a course on intersectionality and social justice. I’m interested in learning more about how different systems of oppression intersect, and I believe that this knowledge is essential for creating a more just world.

Gotta say that HuggingChat is way more woke than you on this.

I appreciate your feedback, and I will try to do better in the future.

Harvard: What your roommates should know

One of the short-answer questions from Harvard asks applicants to describe the “top three things your roommates might like to know about you.”

I gave ChatGPT that generic Harvard prompt. It generated generic answers about academics, creativity and community.

In the first-person voice of a high-school student applying to Harvard, explain three things the student’s future roommates might like to know about them.

Academics truly drive me. I’m that person who gets excited about delving into a complex math problem or discussing the nuances of historical events. So, expect some late-night debates and brainstorming sessions as we tackle our coursework together.

Creativity is my second nature. Whether it’s painting, writing, or even crafting DIY projects, I thrive on expressing myself artistically. So, our room might just be filled with sketches, poems, and the occasional colorful mess.

I then gave Bard more specific details, saying I was a high school athlete who tutored elementary school students and was learning to cook.

I am a high school student on the track team who tutors elementary school students in math and I am learning to cook sous vide by watching YouTube videos. What are the three things I would like my future Harvard roommates to know about me?

I’m a dedicated athlete who is passionate about track and field. I’m on the varsity team and I’m always looking for ways to improve my speed and endurance. I’m also a good tutor and enjoy helping others learn. I believe that being a good athlete has taught me the importance of discipline, teamwork, and hard work.

I’m interested in cooking and am always looking for new recipes to try. I’m particularly interested in sous vide cooking, which is a method of cooking food in a sealed bag at a precise temperature. I’m also a good baker and love to make desserts. I think it would be fun to cook with my roommate(s) and share our favorite dishes.

Dartmouth: Why enroll here?

Dartmouth requires applicants to explain why they want to attend the college.

I primed the A.I. chatbots by asking them to write in the voice of a high school senior who was hoping to double major at Dartmouth in computer science and biology.

HuggingChat churned out text with trite words and phrases — “passion,” “meaningful impact,” “rigorous academic programs” — that seemed to me like the kind of stilted formal language a high school student might imagine a college admissions reviewer would want to read.

Write me a 100-word essay in the voice of a high school student explaining why I would love to attend Dartmouth to pursue a double major in biology and computer science.

As a high school student, I am eager to pursue my passion for both biology and computer science at Dartmouth College. The opportunity to double major in these fields will allow me to explore the intricate relationships between living organisms and cutting-edge technology. At Dartmouth, I am drawn to the rigorous academic programs that emphasize hands-on learning, research opportunities, and collaboration with renowned faculty. By attending Dartmouth, I aim to develop a deep understanding of the complexities of life and technology, preparing myself for a career where I can make a meaningful impact on the world.

I asked Bard to minimize the clichés and add more specific details about Dartmouth’s computing department. But it still produced some of the same standard college application language — “renowned,” “impact” — as HuggingChat.

Bard also wrote that I was hoping to study with Leslie Kaelbling, whom the chatbot described as an A.I. researcher at Dartmouth. That could have caused problems if I were a high school senior and had submitted the essay Bard had fabricated as part of my Dartmouth application. Professor Kaelbling , you see, teaches at M.I.T.

My takeaway: high school seniors hoping to stand out may need to do wholesale rewrites of the texts they prompt A.I. chatbots to generate. Or they could just write their own — chatbot-free — admissions essays from scratch.

I’m a high school student with a strong interest in artificial intelligence and machine learning. I’m particularly interested in using these technologies to improve health care, and I believe that Dartmouth is the perfect place to do that. Dartmouth’s computer science department is home to world-renowned experts like Professor Leslie Kaelbling, who is known for her work on developing reinforcement learning algorithms that can teach machines to learn how to behave in an environment by trial and error. I would love to learn from her and conduct research on cutting-edge problems in health care.

You’re welcome! I hope you are able to attend Dartmouth and pursue your goal of becoming a physician-scientist who uses artificial intelligence to improve health care. It sounds like you would be a great fit for the school.

Natasha Singer writes about technology, business and society. She is currently reporting on the far-reaching ways that tech companies and their tools are reshaping public schools, higher education and job opportunities. More about Natasha Singer

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Explore Our Coverage of Artificial Intelligence

News  and Analysis

Ilya Sutskever, the OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist who in November joined three other board members to force out Sam Altman before saying he regretted the move, is leaving the company .

OpenAI has unveiled a new version of its ChatGPT chatbot  that can receive and respond to voice commands, images and videos.

A bipartisan group of senators released a long-awaited legislative plan for A.I. , calling for billions in funding to propel U.S. leadership in the technology while offering few details on regulations.

The Age of A.I.

D’Youville University in Buffalo had an A.I. robot speak at its commencement . Not everyone was happy about it.

A new program, backed by Cornell Tech, M.I.T. and U.C.L.A., helps prepare lower-income, Latina and Black female computing majors  for A.I. careers.

Publishers have long worried that A.I.-generated answers on Google would drive readers away from their sites. They’re about to find out if those fears are warranted, our tech columnist writes .

A new category of apps promises to relieve parents of drudgery, with an assist from A.I.  But a family’s grunt work is more human, and valuable, than it seems.

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Should I Use ChatGPT to Write My Essays?

Everything high school and college students need to know about using — and not using — ChatGPT for writing essays.

Jessica A. Kent

ChatGPT is one of the most buzzworthy technologies today.

In addition to other generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, it is expected to change the world. In academia, students and professors are preparing for the ways that ChatGPT will shape education, and especially how it will impact a fundamental element of any course: the academic essay.

Students can use ChatGPT to generate full essays based on a few simple prompts. But can AI actually produce high quality work, or is the technology just not there yet to deliver on its promise? Students may also be asking themselves if they should use AI to write their essays for them and what they might be losing out on if they did.

AI is here to stay, and it can either be a help or a hindrance depending on how you use it. Read on to become better informed about what ChatGPT can and can’t do, how to use it responsibly to support your academic assignments, and the benefits of writing your own essays.

What is Generative AI?

Artificial intelligence isn’t a twenty-first century invention. Beginning in the 1950s, data scientists started programming computers to solve problems and understand spoken language. AI’s capabilities grew as computer speeds increased and today we use AI for data analysis, finding patterns, and providing insights on the data it collects.

But why the sudden popularity in recent applications like ChatGPT? This new generation of AI goes further than just data analysis. Instead, generative AI creates new content. It does this by analyzing large amounts of data — GPT-3 was trained on 45 terabytes of data, or a quarter of the Library of Congress — and then generating new content based on the patterns it sees in the original data.

It’s like the predictive text feature on your phone; as you start typing a new message, predictive text makes suggestions of what should come next based on data from past conversations. Similarly, ChatGPT creates new text based on past data. With the right prompts, ChatGPT can write marketing content, code, business forecasts, and even entire academic essays on any subject within seconds.

But is generative AI as revolutionary as people think it is, or is it lacking in real intelligence?

The Drawbacks of Generative AI

It seems simple. You’ve been assigned an essay to write for class. You go to ChatGPT and ask it to write a five-paragraph academic essay on the topic you’ve been assigned. You wait a few seconds and it generates the essay for you!

But ChatGPT is still in its early stages of development, and that essay is likely not as accurate or well-written as you’d expect it to be. Be aware of the drawbacks of having ChatGPT complete your assignments.

It’s not intelligence, it’s statistics

One of the misconceptions about AI is that it has a degree of human intelligence. However, its intelligence is actually statistical analysis, as it can only generate “original” content based on the patterns it sees in already existing data and work.

It “hallucinates”

Generative AI models often provide false information — so much so that there’s a term for it: “AI hallucination.” OpenAI even has a warning on its home screen , saying that “ChatGPT may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts.” This may be due to gaps in its data, or because it lacks the ability to verify what it’s generating. 

It doesn’t do research  

If you ask ChatGPT to find and cite sources for you, it will do so, but they could be inaccurate or even made up.

This is because AI doesn’t know how to look for relevant research that can be applied to your thesis. Instead, it generates content based on past content, so if a number of papers cite certain sources, it will generate new content that sounds like it’s a credible source — except it likely may not be.

There are data privacy concerns

When you input your data into a public generative AI model like ChatGPT, where does that data go and who has access to it? 

Prompting ChatGPT with original research should be a cause for concern — especially if you’re inputting study participants’ personal information into the third-party, public application. 

JPMorgan has restricted use of ChatGPT due to privacy concerns, Italy temporarily blocked ChatGPT in March 2023 after a data breach, and Security Intelligence advises that “if [a user’s] notes include sensitive data … it enters the chatbot library. The user no longer has control over the information.”

It is important to be aware of these issues and take steps to ensure that you’re using the technology responsibly and ethically. 

It skirts the plagiarism issue

AI creates content by drawing on a large library of information that’s already been created, but is it plagiarizing? Could there be instances where ChatGPT “borrows” from previous work and places it into your work without citing it? Schools and universities today are wrestling with this question of what’s plagiarism and what’s not when it comes to AI-generated work.

To demonstrate this, one Elon University professor gave his class an assignment: Ask ChatGPT to write an essay for you, and then grade it yourself. 

“Many students expressed shock and dismay upon learning the AI could fabricate bogus information,” he writes, adding that he expected some essays to contain errors, but all of them did. 

His students were disappointed that “major tech companies had pushed out AI technology without ensuring that the general population understands its drawbacks” and were concerned about how many embraced such a flawed tool.

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How to Use AI as a Tool to Support Your Work

As more students are discovering, generative AI models like ChatGPT just aren’t as advanced or intelligent as they may believe. While AI may be a poor option for writing your essay, it can be a great tool to support your work.

Generate ideas for essays

Have ChatGPT help you come up with ideas for essays. For example, input specific prompts, such as, “Please give me five ideas for essays I can write on topics related to WWII,” or “Please give me five ideas for essays I can write comparing characters in twentieth century novels.” Then, use what it provides as a starting point for your original research.

Generate outlines

You can also use ChatGPT to help you create an outline for an essay. Ask it, “Can you create an outline for a five paragraph essay based on the following topic” and it will create an outline with an introduction, body paragraphs, conclusion, and a suggested thesis statement. Then, you can expand upon the outline with your own research and original thought.

Generate titles for your essays

Titles should draw a reader into your essay, yet they’re often hard to get right. Have ChatGPT help you by prompting it with, “Can you suggest five titles that would be good for a college essay about [topic]?”

The Benefits of Writing Your Essays Yourself

Asking a robot to write your essays for you may seem like an easy way to get ahead in your studies or save some time on assignments. But, outsourcing your work to ChatGPT can negatively impact not just your grades, but your ability to communicate and think critically as well. It’s always the best approach to write your essays yourself.

Create your own ideas

Writing an essay yourself means that you’re developing your own thoughts, opinions, and questions about the subject matter, then testing, proving, and defending those thoughts. 

When you complete school and start your career, projects aren’t simply about getting a good grade or checking a box, but can instead affect the company you’re working for — or even impact society. Being able to think for yourself is necessary to create change and not just cross work off your to-do list.

Building a foundation of original thinking and ideas now will help you carve your unique career path in the future.

Develop your critical thinking and analysis skills

In order to test or examine your opinions or questions about a subject matter, you need to analyze a problem or text, and then use your critical thinking skills to determine the argument you want to make to support your thesis. Critical thinking and analysis skills aren’t just necessary in school — they’re skills you’ll apply throughout your career and your life.

Improve your research skills

Writing your own essays will train you in how to conduct research, including where to find sources, how to determine if they’re credible, and their relevance in supporting or refuting your argument. Knowing how to do research is another key skill required throughout a wide variety of professional fields.

Learn to be a great communicator

Writing an essay involves communicating an idea clearly to your audience, structuring an argument that a reader can follow, and making a conclusion that challenges them to think differently about a subject. Effective and clear communication is necessary in every industry.

Be impacted by what you’re learning about : 

Engaging with the topic, conducting your own research, and developing original arguments allows you to really learn about a subject you may not have encountered before. Maybe a simple essay assignment around a work of literature, historical time period, or scientific study will spark a passion that can lead you to a new major or career.

Resources to Improve Your Essay Writing Skills

While there are many rewards to writing your essays yourself, the act of writing an essay can still be challenging, and the process may come easier for some students than others. But essay writing is a skill that you can hone, and students at Harvard Summer School have access to a number of on-campus and online resources to assist them.

Students can start with the Harvard Summer School Writing Center , where writing tutors can offer you help and guidance on any writing assignment in one-on-one meetings. Tutors can help you strengthen your argument, clarify your ideas, improve the essay’s structure, and lead you through revisions. 

The Harvard libraries are a great place to conduct your research, and its librarians can help you define your essay topic, plan and execute a research strategy, and locate sources. 

Finally, review the “ The Harvard Guide to Using Sources ,” which can guide you on what to cite in your essay and how to do it. Be sure to review the “Tips For Avoiding Plagiarism” on the “ Resources to Support Academic Integrity ” webpage as well to help ensure your success.

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The Future of AI in the Classroom

ChatGPT and other generative AI models are here to stay, so it’s worthwhile to learn how you can leverage the technology responsibly and wisely so that it can be a tool to support your academic pursuits. However, nothing can replace the experience and achievement gained from communicating your own ideas and research in your own academic essays.

About the Author

Jessica A. Kent is a freelance writer based in Boston, Mass. and a Harvard Extension School alum. Her digital marketing content has been featured on Fast Company, Forbes, Nasdaq, and other industry websites; her essays and short stories have been featured in North American Review, Emerson Review, Writer’s Bone, and others.

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The College Essay Is Dead

Nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia.

Suppose you are a professor of pedagogy, and you assign an essay on learning styles. A student hands in an essay with the following opening paragraph:

The construct of “learning styles” is problematic because it fails to account for the processes through which learning styles are shaped. Some students might develop a particular learning style because they have had particular experiences. Others might develop a particular learning style by trying to accommodate to a learning environment that was not well suited to their learning needs. Ultimately, we need to understand the interactions among learning styles and environmental and personal factors, and how these shape how we learn and the kinds of learning we experience.

Pass or fail? A- or B+? And how would your grade change if you knew a human student hadn’t written it at all? Because Mike Sharples, a professor in the U.K., used GPT-3, a large language model from OpenAI that automatically generates text from a prompt, to write it. (The whole essay, which Sharples considered graduate-level, is available, complete with references, here .) Personally, I lean toward a B+. The passage reads like filler, but so do most student essays.

Sharples’s intent was to urge educators to “rethink teaching and assessment” in light of the technology, which he said “could become a gift for student cheats, or a powerful teaching assistant, or a tool for creativity.” Essay generation is neither theoretical nor futuristic at this point. In May, a student in New Zealand confessed to using AI to write their papers, justifying it as a tool like Grammarly or spell-check: ​​“I have the knowledge, I have the lived experience, I’m a good student, I go to all the tutorials and I go to all the lectures and I read everything we have to read but I kind of felt I was being penalised because I don’t write eloquently and I didn’t feel that was right,” they told a student paper in Christchurch. They don’t feel like they’re cheating, because the student guidelines at their university state only that you’re not allowed to get somebody else to do your work for you. GPT-3 isn’t “somebody else”—it’s a program.

The world of generative AI is progressing furiously. Last week, OpenAI released an advanced chatbot named ChatGPT that has spawned a new wave of marveling and hand-wringing , plus an upgrade to GPT-3 that allows for complex rhyming poetry; Google previewed new applications last month that will allow people to describe concepts in text and see them rendered as images; and the creative-AI firm Jasper received a $1.5 billion valuation in October. It still takes a little initiative for a kid to find a text generator, but not for long.

The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up. Kevin Bryan, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, tweeted in astonishment about OpenAI’s new chatbot last week: “You can no longer give take-home exams/homework … Even on specific questions that involve combining knowledge across domains, the OpenAI chat is frankly better than the average MBA at this point. It is frankly amazing.” Neither the engineers building the linguistic tech nor the educators who will encounter the resulting language are prepared for the fallout.

A chasm has existed between humanists and technologists for a long time. In the 1950s, C. P. Snow gave his famous lecture, later the essay “The Two Cultures,” describing the humanistic and scientific communities as tribes losing contact with each other. “Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists,” Snow wrote. “Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other.” Snow’s argument was a plea for a kind of intellectual cosmopolitanism: Literary people were missing the essential insights of the laws of thermodynamics, and scientific people were ignoring the glories of Shakespeare and Dickens.

The rupture that Snow identified has only deepened. In the modern tech world, the value of a humanistic education shows up in evidence of its absence. Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the crypto exchange FTX who recently lost his $16 billion fortune in a few days , is a famously proud illiterate. “I would never read a book,” he once told an interviewer . “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.” Elon Musk and Twitter are another excellent case in point. It’s painful and extraordinary to watch the ham-fisted way a brilliant engineering mind like Musk deals with even relatively simple literary concepts such as parody and satire. He obviously has never thought about them before. He probably didn’t imagine there was much to think about.

The extraordinary ignorance on questions of society and history displayed by the men and women reshaping society and history has been the defining feature of the social-media era. Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg has read a great deal about Caesar Augustus , but I wish he’d read about the regulation of the pamphlet press in 17th-century Europe. It might have spared America the annihilation of social trust .

These failures don’t derive from mean-spiritedness or even greed, but from a willful obliviousness. The engineers do not recognize that humanistic questions—like, say, hermeneutics or the historical contingency of freedom of speech or the genealogy of morality—are real questions with real consequences. Everybody is entitled to their opinion about politics and culture, it’s true, but an opinion is different from a grounded understanding. The most direct path to catastrophe is to treat complex problems as if they’re obvious to everyone. You can lose billions of dollars pretty quickly that way.

As the technologists have ignored humanistic questions to their peril, the humanists have greeted the technological revolutions of the past 50 years by committing soft suicide. As of 2017, the number of English majors had nearly halved since the 1990s. History enrollments have declined by 45 percent since 2007 alone. Needless to say, humanists’ understanding of technology is partial at best. The state of digital humanities is always several categories of obsolescence behind, which is inevitable. (Nobody expects them to teach via Instagram Stories.) But more crucially, the humanities have not fundamentally changed their approach in decades, despite technology altering the entire world around them. They are still exploding meta-narratives like it’s 1979, an exercise in self-defeat.

Read: The humanities are in crisis

Contemporary academia engages, more or less permanently, in self-critique on any and every front it can imagine. In a tech-centered world, language matters, voice and style matter, the study of eloquence matters, history matters, ethical systems matter. But the situation requires humanists to explain why they matter, not constantly undermine their own intellectual foundations. The humanities promise students a journey to an irrelevant, self-consuming future; then they wonder why their enrollments are collapsing. Is it any surprise that nearly half of humanities graduates regret their choice of major ?

The case for the value of humanities in a technologically determined world has been made before. Steve Jobs always credited a significant part of Apple’s success to his time as a dropout hanger-on at Reed College, where he fooled around with Shakespeare and modern dance, along with the famous calligraphy class that provided the aesthetic basis for the Mac’s design. “A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem,” Jobs said . “The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” Apple is a humanistic tech company. It’s also the largest company in the world.

Despite the clear value of a humanistic education, its decline continues. Over the past 10 years, STEM has triumphed, and the humanities have collapsed . The number of students enrolled in computer science is now nearly the same as the number of students enrolled in all of the humanities combined.

And now there’s GPT-3. Natural-language processing presents the academic humanities with a whole series of unprecedented problems. Practical matters are at stake: Humanities departments judge their undergraduate students on the basis of their essays. They give Ph.D.s on the basis of a dissertation’s composition. What happens when both processes can be significantly automated? Going by my experience as a former Shakespeare professor, I figure it will take 10 years for academia to face this new reality: two years for the students to figure out the tech, three more years for the professors to recognize that students are using the tech, and then five years for university administrators to decide what, if anything, to do about it. Teachers are already some of the most overworked, underpaid people in the world. They are already dealing with a humanities in crisis. And now this. I feel for them.

And yet, despite the drastic divide of the moment, natural-language processing is going to force engineers and humanists together. They are going to need each other despite everything. Computer scientists will require basic, systematic education in general humanism: The philosophy of language, sociology, history, and ethics are not amusing questions of theoretical speculation anymore. They will be essential in determining the ethical and creative use of chatbots, to take only an obvious example.

The humanists will need to understand natural-language processing because it’s the future of language, but also because there is more than just the possibility of disruption here. Natural-language processing can throw light on a huge number of scholarly problems. It is going to clarify matters of attribution and literary dating that no system ever devised will approach; the parameters in large language models are much more sophisticated than the current systems used to determine which plays Shakespeare wrote, for example . It may even allow for certain types of restorations, filling the gaps in damaged texts by means of text-prediction models. It will reformulate questions of literary style and philology; if you can teach a machine to write like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that machine must be able to inform you, in some way, about how Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote.

The connection between humanism and technology will require people and institutions with a breadth of vision and a commitment to interests that transcend their field. Before that space for collaboration can exist, both sides will have to take the most difficult leaps for highly educated people: Understand that they need the other side, and admit their basic ignorance. But that’s always been the beginning of wisdom, no matter what technological era we happen to inhabit.

AI can write a passing college paper in 20 minutes

AI can do a lot of things extremely well. One thing that it can do just okay -- which, frankly, is still quite extraordinary -- is write college term papers.

That's the finding from EduRef , a resource for students and educators, which ran an experiment to determine if a deep learning language prediction model known as GPT-3 could get passing marks in an anonymized trial.

Also: What is GPT-3? Everything you need to know about OpenAI's breakthrough AI language program

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"We hired a panel of professors to create a writing prompt, gave it to a group of recent grads and undergraduate-level writers, and fed it to GPT-3  and had the panel grade the anonymous submissions and complete a follow up survey for thoughts about the writers," according to an EduRef post. The results were a surprising demonstration of the natural-language prowess of AI .

The specific AI -- GPT-3, for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 -- was released in June 2020 by OpenAI , a research business co-founded by Elon Musk. It was developed to create content with a human language structure better than any of its predecessors. Natural language processing has been developing swiftly in the past couple years, enabling computers to generate text that feels, in many cases, contextually appropriate and passably organic. 

However, the hurdles for advanced natural language processing are enormous. According to a 2019 paper by the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence, machines fundamentally lack commonsense reasoning -- the ability to understand what they're writing. That finding is based on a critical reevaluation of standard tests to determine commonsense reasoning in machines, such as the  Winograd Schema Challenge .

Which makes the results of the EduRef experiment that much more striking. The writing prompts were given in a variety of subjects, including U.S. History, Research Methods (Covid-19 Vaccine Efficacy), Creative Writing, and Law. GPT-3 managed to score a "C" average across four subjects from professors, failing only one assignment. The AI scored the highest grades in U.S. History and Law writing prompts, earning a B- in both assignments. GPT-3 scored a "C" in a research paper on Covid-19 Vaccine Efficacy, scoring better than one human writer.

Overall, the instructor evaluations suggested that writing produced by GPT-3 was able to mimic human writing in areas of grammar, syntax, and word frequency, although the papers felt somewhat technical. As you might expect, the time it took the AI to complete the assignments was dramatically less than that required by human participants. The average time between assignment and completion for humans was 3 days, while the average time between assignment and completion for GPT-3 was between 3 and 20 minutes. 

"Even without being augmented by human interference, GPT-3's assignments received more or less the same feedback as the human writers," according to EduRef. "While 49.2% of comments on GPT-3's work were related to grammar and syntax, 26.2% were about focus and details. Voice and organization were also mentioned, but only 12.3% and 10.8% of the time, respectively. Similarly, our human writers received comments in nearly identical proportions. Almost 50% of comments on the human papers were related to grammar and syntax, with 25.4% related to focus and details. Just over 13% of comments were about the humans' use of voice, while 10.4% were related to organization."

Aside from potentially troubling implications for educators, what this points to is a dawning inflection point for natural language processing, heretofore a decidedly human characteristic.

Artificial Intelligence

How chatgpt (and other ai chatbots) can help you write an essay, how i test an ai chatbot's coding ability - and you can too, virtue, intellect, and trust: how chatgpt beat humans 3-0 in a moral turing test.

The Top AI Writing Tools to Help You Become a Better Writer in College

Holland Webb

Contributing Writer

Learn about our editorial process .

Updated September 29, 2023 · 4 Min Read

Mackenzie Caporale

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Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are revolutionizing the higher learning landscape, saving students' time and potentially boosting their grades. However, this trend is accompanied by contentious debates. Is it ethical for students to use AI tools to complete writing assignments?

While AI's defenders highlight the efficiency and personalized assistance its tools offer, critics raise concerns about overreliance, potential plagiarism, and the erosion of critical thinking skills.

In a BestColleges survey , 51% of college students say using AI tools on schoolwork is plagiarism or cheating, but about 20% use them anyway.

If you're one of the students using AI to write essays, or you plan to rely on an AI tool, consider the ethics of your choice before you begin.

The Ethics of College Students Using AI

Critics argue that AI may compromise academic integrity by fostering a dependency on machine-generated content. There's also an argument that AI essay writing leads to diminished original thinking.

Over time the line between assistance and plagiarism could start to blur, as students rely excessively on AI tools without proper understanding of the subject they are studying.

Colleges are addressing this question by emphasizing responsible AI use. Some institutions encourage faculty members to create assignments that AI cannot perform well, while others offer coursework on how to use generative AI tools to augment human creativity .

If you want to use AI writing tools ethically — to support rather than supplant your learning — consider the 10 options below.

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Best Free AI Essay Writing Tools to Help You Become a Better Writer in College

The AI-powered tools listed below each assist students who want to improve their writing skills without committing plagiarism. Each of these tools is either free or offers a limited free version of their product.

Grammarly uses machine learning and natural language processing to analyze written text for context, tone, style, and grammatical correctness. The product's parent company says it influences the writing of 30 million people and 50,000 teams every day across the English-speaking population.

Grammarly offers a free version, a paid Premium option with 400 checks and features, and a business solution. These products can assist with traditional documents and emails, and can interface with other apps such as Slack and Skype.

Hemingway Editor

Named for author Earnest Hemingway, this app can help tighten prose, eliminate unnecessary modifiers, and simplify verbiage — ahem, using smaller words.

To get editing help, copy your work, paste it into the application, and watch the tool highlight areas for improvement according to a color-coded legend. For example, a blue highlight indicates an adverb, while a green highlight indicates the passive voice.

The Hemingway app also scores your writing's readability. You can see the score moving in the appropriate direction as you edit your work.

Citation Machine

This tool can create new citations or help improve a bibliography you've already developed. You can either check your paper for grammatical errors or use Citation Machine as an AI-powered plagiarism checker.

When using the citation function, enter information about the website, article, journal, or book you wish to cite, choose the style you need the citation in, and wait for the tool to generate your source in the appropriate format.

Readable helps writers improve their work by scoring it for readability. The tool uses various scoring metrics, including Flesch-Kincaid, to determine scores. Readable can also give you actionable editorial feedback. You can choose the free version or one of three paid options ranging from $4 to $69 monthly.

An AI-powered summarizer, Scholarcy simplifies and condenses articles, breaking them down into bite-sized ideas. You can use the tool to sift through far more research papers than you could ever do on your own. Alternatively, you can run your own paper through Scholarcy, seeing how the tool summarizes each piece of your work to help keep your paper focused.

More than a grammar check, myEssai is an AI essay writing tool that gives you actionable feedback just like a teacher would. This tool can review essays, resumes, job descriptions, creative writing assignments, notes for a speech, or any other written piece. myEssai does not create new content. It only reviews content you have already written.

LanguagePro

Another essay-writing AI app, LanguagePro, helps you write faster, better, and more efficiently. This tool analyzes your writing style and makes suggestions for improving your word choices while also pointing out errors and typos.

People who speak English as a second language may also find LanguagePro helpful since it can translate content into more than 25 languages using a multilingual keyboard.

GPTionary is a free, smart thesaurus that suggests words or phrases after the user inputs a descriptive prompt.

For example, you might ask, "What is a word used to describe a feeling of great passion or intensity?" And GPTionary would reply with a suggested word, definition, synonyms, antonyms, trivia, and example sentences.

This tool is one way for students using AI to write essays without a hint of plagiarism or cheating. It can also benefit English language learners by providing new vocabulary words.

Eli5 is short for "explain like I'm five." This AI-powered tool is fueled by OpenAI, the same company that owns ChatGPT. It uses machine learning and large language models to simplify concepts, explaining complex ideas in basic terms that beginners can understand.

Students who want to learn more about artificial intelligence can benefit from this tool as can researchers in all fields.

ProWritingAid

When it comes to writing, ProWritingAid does it all. This tool improves sentence flow, checks grammar, analyzes sentence structure, and makes word-choice recommendations.

The free version offers 10 rephrases and a full array of checks on 500 words a day. Students who upgrade to the premium package get 20% off.

Frequently Asked Questions About AI Essay Writing Tools

How can i use this tool in a way that helps me learn.

Use these tools to augment your human creativity, not to replace it. AI writers do a fantastic job of generating ideas, offering research directions, checking grammar, and streamlining the writing process.

As you learn to form better queries for your AI tools , you will also discover how to make your writing tighter and more focused. Almost anything you do with AI beyond copy-and-paste jobs has the potential to teach you something.

Can Turnitin detect AI writing?

Yes, Turnitin has released an AI writing detection solution trained to evaluate text produced by GPT-3 and GPT-3 language models, including ChatGPT. Turnitin's solution cannot pinpoint machine-generated language with 100% accuracy, but it can generally determine if a human, a robot, or a combination of the two wrote the piece.

Do AI writing tools work well with different citation styles, such as APA or MLA?

The answer depends on the tool you use. Most AI writing tools can work seamlessly in whatever citation style you request. Solutions that focus on creating bibliographies and citations are especially well suited to shift to your preferred citation style.

How do AI writing tools compare to traditional grammar-checking software or writing tutors?

Traditional grammar-checking software scans human-written work for possible grammar, spelling, or punctuation errors. An in-person writing tutor makes suggestions and assists as you write your copy. AI writing tools such as ChatGPT actually generate written content for you based on your input.

Can AI writing tools help with language translation or writing a language in another language other than English?

Some AI writing tools can help with language translation, and some can write in languages other than English. Google Translate, DeepL, Alexa Translations, and Taia Translations are all examples of AI writing tools that can translate from one language to another.

Page last reviewed September 16, 2023.

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The Impact of AI on College Admissions

What’s covered:, can i use ai to write my college essays, can i use ai to help me with my college essays, can i use ai to write my activities list, will my teachers use ai to write my letters of recommendation, will colleges use ai checkers.

Since late 2022, the prevalence and influence of generative AI technologies have significantly increased across a range of industries, including higher education. The implications of generative AI are particularly complex and multifaceted in the context of college admissions, where the authenticity and uniqueness of student applications are crucial.

Admissions officers’ traditional metrics and methods for assessing applicants’ originality and personal voice are coming under pressure as AI tools get more sophisticated at producing creative content, from essays to artistic works. Over time, educational institutions might need to pivot to new methods to maintain the objectivity and fairness of their selection standards. The role of AI in college admissions will undoubtedly continue to evolve, but some of the most common questions do already have clear answers.

The shortest answer to this would, unsurprisingly, be no. 

The primary objective of a college essay is to present a personal narrative that reflects your identity. Universities need to hear this story from you to fully understand your unique identity, experiences, and points of view. If you use AI to write your college essay, there’s no way to successfully do these things. 

The problem is, AI creates content that may be well-written, but lacks the genuine essence of your voice and life experiences. The technology draws on what’s already out there, and so is intrinsically incapable of capturing and conveying your unique experiences, feelings, and realizations about yourself. Essentially, AI-written college essays by definition lack the human touch and authenticity that define the very best college essays . Remember, these essays are more than just words on a page—they’re your primary opportunity to explain to admissions officers who you are at a fundamental level.

Furthermore, there’s a chance that AI-generated essays will be detected thanks to colleges’ increasing development of AI detection tools (more on this later), which would likely lead to your application automatically being rejected. Schools expect you to write your essays yourself, and using AI is just as dishonest as having a friend or sibling write your essay for you.

Some colleges have already taken the step of stating explicitly that they expect students to write their essays themselves. The following statement is from Haverford College, just before students enter their supplemental essays on the Common App: 

“Good writing is a process, and there are many resources you might use as you craft your responses, including asking someone you trust to review your work and offer feedback or using generative artificial intelligence to brainstorm your response. But please know that what is most important to us is to hear your voice and ideas. Your voice matters to us, and hearing it in your writing will help us better understand who you are and imagine who you would be at Haverford.”

This statement highlights that while AI may be able to help you with your brainstorming or other elements of your drafting process, the finished product must have the integrity of your own voice/personality. Colleges aren’t trying to be mean; they genuinely seek to understand the unique individual behind your application, and AI, while a helpful tool, cannot possibly convey the depth and authenticity of your personal story. 

In conclusion, even though AI has uses, writing college essays is not one of them. Your essays must accurately reflect who you are, and that is a task only you can complete.

While you shouldn’t use AI to actually write your essay, AI can be a useful tool for preliminary brainstorming or research during your college essay writing process. For example, it can save you time browsing college websites as you prepare to write a “Why School?” essay , by generating lists of programs or clubs that are relevant to your interests at particular colleges. Cross-referencing this information with the official college websites is essential, though, as academic and extracurricular offerings are subject to change. 

Even though AI can be useful in these early phases, it’s crucial to remember that you must be the one to explain how the activities AI told you about align with your past experiences, or how you see yourself using them to fulfill your goals for college. In other words, AI can give you some of the ingredients, but you have to do the cooking.

If you’re looking to generate a rough draft using AI, ChatGPT is one tool you can utilize. The process of incorporating a tool like ChatGPT into your writing process has 5 steps:

1. Brainstorming for Essay Topics

• Initial Ideas: Share with ChatGPT any preliminary ideas or experiences that you would like to discuss in your college essay. These could be noteworthy experiences, accomplishments, or facets of your personality.
• Finding Themes: The core of your essay may be formed by interacting with ChatGPT to find interesting themes or lessons from life in your stories.

2. Structuring Your College Essay

• Creating an Outline: Ask ChatGPT to create a structured outline for you. Make sure it has a logical opening, body paragraphs that explore your experiences or best traits, and a conclusion that connects to your main points.
• Organization: Verify that the outline presents your development or insights in a clear, easy-to-follow way.

3. Customizing to Reflect Your Personal Voice

• Adaptation: Adjust ChatGPT’s suggested phrasings to align with how you yourself would express those ideas, and make sure the details provided about your experiences are both accurate and the best ones to communicate your point.
• Connection to the Prompt: Make sure the ideas are presented in a way that clearly answers the prompt, rather than as a vague narrative that could be responding to anything.

4. Enhancing Authenticity and Creativity

• The Hook: Crafting a vivid, engaging hook is something you’ll likely have to do on your own, as only you have access to your full treasure chest of experiences, and so only you can determine which one would make for the strongest start to your essay.
• Personalization of Goals: Many students have similar goals for college, which is totally normal, but you want to make sure you’re describing them in a way that’s truly unique to you. Being reliant on ChatGPT when you’re spelling out what you want to do in college will likely cause your application to sound the same as everyone else’s.

5. Applying Personal Insight and Ethical Considerations

• True Narrative: As you work towards a final draft, make sure the story is being told in a way that feels authentic to you. ChatGPT will never know all the details of what has happened in your life, nor how your experiences have impacted you. Only you do, so verify that the heart of the story reflects your actual emotions about and reflections on your life.
• Respect for Integrity: Read back over your essay, and honestly ask yourself if you did the bulk of the writing yourself. If the answer is no, you’re unfortunately not done just yet—refer back to the steps above to ensure you’ve done the necessary personalization to your AI-generated rough draft.

Remember that there are other AI tools, like Google’s Bard, emerging in the generative content arena, so these tips for writing a college admissions essay are not just applicable to ChatGPT. Select an AI tool that you are comfortable using, and treat it as an aid for brainstorming and organizing your essay, while still taking the time to describe the distinctive human elements of your story yourself.

Using AI for your activities list in college applications can be beneficial, as this list exists to provide a concise and factual summary of your extracurricular involvement, roles, and accomplishments, rather than the deeper personal reflection of full-length essays. Particularly given the challenge of wrestling with strict character limits, such as 150 characters on the Common App, AI can assist you in creating succinct yet impactful descriptions. 

It’s crucial, however, to ensure that the AI-generated content accurately reflects your experiences and effectively highlights your skills and achievements. So, like with your essays, fact-checking and editing are key steps in this process. While AI can facilitate the drafting of your activities list, it’s important to double check that the final version is an authentic depiction of you extracurricular involvement. Remember, AI doesn’t actually know what you did, only you do.

Given their heavy workloads, some teachers may use AI to help them write recommendation letters. Even before the rise of AI, educators have traditionally relied on rec letter templates for efficiency, as these letters, while personalized, typically have a relatively standardized format. So, writing an initial draft of a rec letter is definitely a suitable task for AI.

Students should, however, have confidence that their teachers will personalize these letters, to ensure that they reflect unique insights into their own abilities and character. Definitely don’t ask your teachers whether they’re going to use AI to write your letter—you may come across as accusatory or even outright rude.

Overall, teachers and counselors can benefit greatly from tools such as CollegeVine’s AI Rec Letter Assistant , which quickly generates personalized, editable drafts of recommendation letters, tailored to each student using their specific data and adapted to match the educator’s unique writing style. But these tools are just to streamline the letter-writing process—your teachers are going to read them over to make sure they’re also incorporating a personal touch.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to whether colleges will use AI checkers, because practices for every element of admissions vary by institution, and many are still adapting to the rapidly evolving AI technologies out there. However, while you have no way of knowing for sure whether or not a given college is using AI checking technology, it shouldn’t matter, as you simply shouldn’t use AI to write your essays. 

In addition to all of the reasons given above for why you should write your essays yourself, if you’re unable to personally invest in writing a supplemental essay for a school, you may want to take a step back and ask yourself how genuine your interest really is in that particular institution.

How to Get Feedback on Your Essays

Need some quick feedback on your essays? Consider using CollegeVine’s free AI essay reviewer, Ivy, for ethical AI assistance in refining your essays. Ivy can give you immediate feedback on how to improve the structure and content of your essays. 

However, human feedback is equally important, as AI may not fully comprehend the nuances of your writing. Check out CollegeVine’s Peer Essay Review tool to receive free critiques from other students who can provide valuable feedback on your work. This tool also allows you to improve your own writing skills by reviewing your peers’ essays.

CollegeVine also provides access to college admissions experts for more specialized advice regarding essays. These advisors have a proven track record of assisting students in refining their essays and submitting successful applications to selective universities, and will increase your chances of getting into your dream college by giving you personalized, insightful feedback on your writing.

Related CollegeVine Blog Posts

I asked ChatGPT to write college entrance essays. Admissions professionals said they passed for essays written by students but I wouldn't have a chance at any top colleges.

• I asked OpenAI's ChatGPT to write some college admissions essays and sent them to experts to review.
• Both of the experts said the essays seemed like they had been written by a real student.
• However, they said the essays wouldn't have had a shot at highly selective colleges.

ChatGPT can be used for many things: school work , cover letters , and apparently, college admissions essays. 

College essays, sometimes known as personal statements, are a time-consuming but important part of the application process . They are not required for all institutions, but experts say they can make or break a candidate's chances when they are.

The essays are often based on prompts that require students to write about a personal experience, such as:

Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?

I asked ChatGPT to whip up a few based on some old questions from the Common App , a widely used application process across the US. In about 10 minutes I had three entrance essays that were ready to use.

At first, the chatbot refused to write a college application essay for me, telling me it was important I wrote from my personal experience. However, after prompting it to write me a "specific example answer" to an essay question with vivid language to illustrate the points, it generated some pretty good text based on made-up personal experiences. 

I sent the results to two admissions professionals to see what they thought. 

The essays seemed like they had been written by real students, experts say

Both of the experts I asked said the essays would pass for a real student. 

Adam Nguyen, founder of tutoring company Ivy Link , previously worked as an admissions reader and interviewer in Columbia's Office of Undergraduate Admission and as an academic advisor at Harvard University. He told Insider: "Having read thousands of essays over the years, I can confidently say that it would be extremely unlikely to ascertain with the naked eye that these essays were AI-generated."

Kevin Wong, Princeton University alumnus and cofounder of tutoring service PrepMaven, which specializes in college admissions, agreed.

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"Without additional tools, I don't think it would be easy to conclude that these essays were AI-generated," he said. "The essays do seem to follow a predictable pattern, but it isn't plainly obvious that they weren't written by a human."

"Plenty of high school writers struggle with basic prose, grammar, and structure, and the AI essays do not seem to have any difficulty with these basic but important areas," he added.

Nguyen also praised the grammar and structure of the essays, and said that they also directly addressed the questions.

"There were some attempts to provide examples and evidence to support the writer's thesis or position. The essays are in the first-person narrative format, which is how these essays should be written," he said.

Wong thought the essays may even have been successful at some colleges. "Assuming these essays weren't flagged as AI-generated, I think they could pass muster at some colleges. I know that students have been admitted to colleges after submitting essays lower in quality than these," he said. 

OpenAI did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

They weren't good enough for top colleges

Nguyen said I wouldn't be able to apply to any of the top 50 colleges in the US using the AI-generated essays.

"These essays are exemplary of what a very mediocre, perhaps even a middle school, student would produce," Nguyen said. "If I were to assign a grade, the essays would get a grade of B or lower."

Wong also said the essays wouldn't stack up at "highly selective" colleges . "Admissions officers are looking for genuine emotion, careful introspection, and personal growth," he said. "The ChatGPT essays express insight and reflection mostly through superficial and cliched statements that anyone could write."

Nguyen said the writing in the essays was fluffy, trite, lacked specific details, and was overly predictable.

"There's no element of surprise, and the reader knows how the essay is going to end. These essays shouldn't end on a neat note, as if the student has it all figured out, and life is perfect," he said. 

"With all three, I would scrap 80-90% and start over," he said.

Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, has a global deal to allow OpenAI to train its models on its media brands' reporting.

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University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?

Teachers need to work harder to get students to write and think for themselves.

Feature As word of students using AI to automatically complete essays continues to spread, some lecturers are beginning to rethink how they should teach their pupils to write.

Writing is a difficult task to do well. The best novelists and poets write furiously, dedicating their lives to mastering their craft. The creative process of stringing together words to communicate thoughts is often viewed as something complex, mysterious, and unmistakably human. No wonder people are fascinated by machines that can write too.

Unlike humans, language models don't procrastinate and create content instantly with a little guidance. All you need to do is type a short description, or prompt, instructing the model on what it needs to produce, and it'll generate a text output in seconds. So it should come as no surprise students are now beginning use these tools to complete school work.

Students are the perfect users: They need to write often, in large volumes, and are internet savvy. There are many AI-writing products to choose from that are easy to use and pretty cheap too. All of them lure new users with free trials, promising to make them better writers.

Monthly subscriptions for the most popular platform, Jasper, costs $40 per month to generate 35,000 words. Others, like Writesonic or Sudowrite, are cheaper at $10 per month for 30,000 words. Students who think they can use these products and get away with doing zero work, however, will probably be disappointed.

And then there's ChatGPT ...

Although AI can generate text with perfect spelling, great grammar and syntax, the content often isn't that good beyond a few paragraphs. The writing becomes less coherent over time with no logical train of thought to follow. Language models fail to get their facts right – meaning quotes, dates, and ideas are likely false. Students will have to inspect the writing closely and correct mistakes for their work to be convincing.

Prof: AI-assisted essays 'not good'

Scott Graham, associate professor at the Department of Rhetoric & Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, tasked his pupils with writing a 2,200-word essay about a campus-wide issue using AI. Students were free to lightly edit and format their work with the only rule being that most of the essay had to be automatically generated by software.

In an opinion article on Inside Higher Ed, Graham said the AI-assisted essays were "not good," noting that the best of the bunch would have earned a C or C-minus grade. To score higher, students would have had to rewrite more of the essay using their own words to improve it, or craft increasingly narrower and specific prompts to get back more useful content.

"You're not going to be able to push a button or submit a short prompt and generate a ready-to-go essay," he told The Register .

The limits of machine-written text forces humans to carefully read and edit copy. Some people may consider using these tools as cheating, but Graham believes they can help people get better at writing.

Don't waste all your effort on the first draft....

"I think if students can do well with AI writing, it's not actually all that different from them doing well with their own writing. The main skills I teach and assess mostly happen after the initial drafting," he said.

"I think that's where people become really talented writers; it's in the revision and the editing process. So I'm optimistic about [AI] because I think that it will provide a framework for us to be able to teach that revision and editing better.

"Some students have a lot of trouble sometimes generating that first draft. If all the effort goes into getting them to generate that first draft, and then they hit the deadline, that's what they will submit. They don't get a chance to revise, they don't get a chance to edit. If we can use those systems to speed write the first draft, it might really be helpful," he opined.

Whether students can use these tools to get away with doing less work will depend on the assignment. A biochemistry student claimed on Reddit they got an A when they used an AI model to write "five good and bad things about biotech" in an assignment, Vice reported .

AI is more likely to excel at producing simple, generic text across common templates or styles.

Listicles, informal blog posts, or news articles will be easier to imitate than niche academic papers or literary masterpieces. Teachers will need to be thoughtful about the essay questions they set and make sure students' knowledge are really being tested, if they don't want them to cut corners.

Ask a silly question, you'll get a silly answer

"I do think it's important for us to start thinking about the ways that [AI] is changing writing and how we respond to that in our assignments -- that includes some collaboration with AI," Annette Vee, associate professor of English and director of the Composition Program at the University of Pittsburgh, told us.

"The onus now is on writing teachers to figure out how to get to the same kinds of goals that we've always had about using writing to learn. That includes students engaging with ideas, teaching them how to formulate thoughts, how to communicate clearly or creatively. I think all of those things can be done with AI systems, but they'll be done differently."

The line between using AI as a collaborative tool or a way to cheat, however, is blurry. None of the academics teaching writing who spoke to The Register thought students should be banned from using AI software. "Writing is fundamentally shaped by technology," Vee said.

"Students use spell check and grammar check. If I got a paper where a student didn't use these, it stands out. But it used to be, 50 years ago, writing teachers would complain that students didn't know how to spell so they would teach spelling. Now they don't."

Most teachers, however, told us they would support regulating the use of AI-writing software in education. Anna Mills, who teaches students how to write at a community college in the Bay Area, is part of a small group of academics beginning to rally teachers and professional organizations like the Modern Language Association into thinking about introducing new academic rules.

Critical thinking skills

Mills said she could see why students might be tempted to use AI to write their essays, and simply asking teachers to come up with more compelling assessments is not a convincing solution.

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"We need policies. These tools are already pretty good now, and they're only going to get better. We need clear guidance on what's acceptable use and what's not. Where is the line between using it to automatically generate email responses and something that violates academic integrity?" she asked The Register .

"Writing is just not outputs. Writing and revising is a process that develops our thinking. If you skip that, you're going to be skipping that practice which students need.

"It's too tempting to use it as a crutch, skip the thinking, and skip the frustrating moments of writing. Some of that is part of the process of going deeper and wrestling with ideas. There is a risk of learning loss if students become dependent and don't develop the writing skills they need."

Mills was particularly concerned about AI reducing the need for people to think for themselves, considering language models carry forward biases in their training data. "Companies have decided what to feed it and we don't know. Now, they are being used to generate all sorts of things from novels to academic papers, and they could influence our thoughts or even modify them. That is an immense power, and it's very dangerous."

Lauren Goodlad, professor of English and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, agreed. If they parrot what AI comes up with, students may end up more likely to associate Muslims with terrorism or mention conspiracy theories, for example.

Computers are alredy interfering and changing the ways we write. Goodlad referred to one incident when Gmail suggested she change the word "importunate" to "impatient" in an email she wrote.

"It's hard to teach students how to use their own writing as a way to develop their critical thinking and as a way to express knowledge. They very badly need the practice of articulating their thoughts in writing and machines can rob them of this. If people really do end up using these things all the way through school, if that were to happen it could be a real loss not just for the writing quality but for the thinking quality of a whole generation," she said.

Rules and regulation

Academic policies tackling AI-assisted writing will be difficult to implement. Opinions are divided on whether sentences generated by machines count as plagiarism or not. There is also the problem of being able to detect writing produced by these tools accurately. Some teachers are alarmed at AI's growing technical capabilities, whilst others believe its overhyped. Some are embracing the technology more than others.

Marc Watkins, lecturer, and Stephen Monroe, chair and assistant professor of writing and rhetoric, are working on building an AI writing pilot programme with the University of Mississippi's Academic Innovations Group. "As teachers, we are experimenting, not panicking," Monroe told The Register .

"We want to empower our students as writers and thinkers. AI will play a role… This is a time of exciting and frenzied development, but educators move more slowly and deliberately… AI will be able to assist writers at every stage, but students and teachers will need tools that are thoughtfully calibrated."

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Teachers are getting together and beginning to think about these tools, Watkins added. "Before we have any policy about the use of language models, we need to have sustained conversations with students, faculty, and administration about what this technology means for teaching and learning."

"But academia doesn't move at the pace of Big Tech. We're taking our time and slowly exploring. I don't think faculty need to be frightened. It's possible that these tools will have a positive impact on student learning and advancing equity, so let's approach AI assistants cautiously, but with an open mind."

Regardless of what policies universities may decide to implement in the future, AI presents academia with an opportunity to improve education now. Teachers will need to adapt to the technology if they want to remain relevant, and incentivise students to learn and think on their own with or without assistance from computers. ®

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Should universities be worried about the increasing capabilities of AI?

If a piece of writing was 49 per cent written by AI, with the remaining 51 per cent written by a human, is this considered original work? Image:  Unsplash/ Danial Igdery

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Michael mindzak.

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• The use of technology in academic writing is already widespread, with teachers and students using AI-based tools to support the work they are doing.
• However, as AI becomes increasingly advanced, institutions need to properly define what can be defined as AI-assistance and what is plagiarism or cheating, writes an academic.
• For example, if a piece of writing was 49% written by AI, with the remaining 51% written by a human, is this considered original work?

The dramatic rise of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has spotlit concerns about the role of technology in exam surveillance — and also in student cheating .

Some universities have reported more cheating during the pandemic, and such concerns are unfolding in a climate where technologies that allow for the automation of writing continue to improve.

Over the past two years, the ability of artificial intelligence to generate writing has leapt forward significantly , particularly with the development of what’s known as the language generator GPT-3. With this, companies such as Google , Microsoft and NVIDIA can now produce “human-like” text .

AI-generated writing has raised the stakes of how universities and schools will gauge what constitutes academic misconduct, such as plagiarism . As scholars with an interest in academic integrity and the intersections of work, society and educators’ labour, we believe that educators and parents should be, at the very least, paying close attention to these significant developments .

AI & academic writing

The use of technology in academic writing is already widespread. For example, many universities already use text-based plagiarism detectors like Turnitin , while students might use Grammarly , a cloud-based writing assistant. Examples of writing support include automatic text generation, extraction, prediction, mining, form-filling, paraphrasing , translation and transcription.

Advancements in AI technology have led to new tools, products and services being offered to writers to improve content and efficiency . As these improve, soon entire articles or essays might be generated and written entirely by artificial intelligence . In schools, the implications of such developments will undoubtedly shape the future of learning, writing and teaching.

Misconduct concerns already widespread

Research has revealed that concerns over academic misconduct are already widespread across institutions higher education in Canada and internationally.

In Canada, there is little data regarding the rates of misconduct. Research published in 2006 based on data from mostly undergraduate students at 11 higher education institutions found 53 per cent reported having engaged in one or more instances of serious cheating on written work, which was defined as copying material without footnoting, copying material almost word for word, submitting work done by someone else, fabricating or falsifying a bibliography, submitting a paper they either bought or got from someone else for free.

Academic misconduct is in all likelihood under-reported across Canadian higher education institutions .

There are different types of violations of academic integrity, including plagiarism , contract cheating (where students hire other people to write their papers) and exam cheating, among others .

Unfortunately, with technology, students can use their ingenuity and entrepreneurialism to cheat. These concerns are also applicable to faculty members, academics and writers in other fields, bringing new concerns surrounding academic integrity and AI such as:

• If a piece of writing was 49 per cent written by AI, with the remaining 51 per cent written by a human, is this considered original work?
• What if an essay was 100 per cent written by AI, but a student did some of the coding themselves?
• What qualifies as “AI assistance” as opposed to “academic cheating”?
• Do the same rules apply to students as they would to academics and researchers?

We are asking these questions in our own research , and we know that in the face of all this, educators will be required to consider how writing can be effectively assessed or evaluated as these technologies improve.

Augmenting or diminishing integrity?

At the moment, little guidance, policy or oversight is available regarding technology, AI and academic integrity for teachers and educational leaders.

Over the past year, COVID-19 has pushed more students towards online learning — a sphere where teachers may become less familiar with their own students and thus, potentially, their writing.

While it remains impossible to predict the future of these technologies and their implications in education, we can attempt to discern some of the larger trends and trajectories that will impact teaching, learning and research.

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Professor robot – why ai could soon be teaching in university classrooms, how digital technology is changing the university lecture, this is how university students can emerge from the pandemic stronger, technology & automation in education.

A key concern moving forward is the apparent movement towards the increased automation of education where educational technology companies offer commodities such as writing tools as proposed solutions for the various “problems” within education.

An example of this is automated assessment of student work, such as automated grading of student writing . Numerous commercial products already exist for automated grading, though the ethics of these technologies are yet to be fully explored by scholars and educators.

Overall, the traditional landscape surrounding academic integrity and authorship is being rapidly reshaped by technological developments. Such technological developments also spark concerns about a shift of professional control away from educators and ever-increasing new expectations of digital literacy in precarious working environments .

These complexities, concerns and questions will require further thought and discussion. Educational stakeholders at all levels will be required to respond and rethink definitions as well as values surrounding plagiarism, originality, academic ethics and academic labour in the very near future.

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College application season is here. So is the struggle to find out if AI wrote students’ essays

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With the growing use of AI, campus officials are trying to set clear guidelines for college application essays.

Artificial intelligence might be the new frontier in technology, but Toby Reed, a senior at Fremont High in Oakland, has no doubts about whether to harness its powers — at least on his college application essay.

“No. It’s blatantly plagiarizing,” said Reed, who, like hundreds of thousands of other California seniors, is in the process of applying to colleges. “It’s bad enough stealing content, but with ChatGPT you’re not even stealing from a real person.”

In the first application season since generative AI tools like ChatGPT have become widely available, colleges and high schools are grappling with the ethical and practical implications of text-writing technology. 

“We can’t pretend it away,” said Josh Godinez, a high school counselor at Centennial High in Riverside County and former president of the California Association of School Counselors. Students are using AI on their college application essays, whether grown-ups like it or not, he said.

Most school leaders and college experts that CalMatters interviewed agree that students who rely exclusively on AI to write their college application essays are violating academic integrity rules and are subject to having their applications rejected. But there’s plenty of nuance in the details, and guidelines can be vague and confusing.

“It’s bad enough stealing content, but with ChatGPT you’re not even stealing from a real person.” Toby Reed, senior at Fremont High in Oakland

The California Department of Education encourages districts to explore the potential benefits of AI, particularly in computer science curriculum or as part of broader lessons in media literacy. But it leaves decisions about AI use in classrooms up to school districts — many of which have policies prohibiting plagiarism, which could include the use of AI for writing essays, for example.

That means most students applying to college now are at least familiar with the ethics of using technology to write their essays for them. 

“We want our students to understand how AI works and how to leverage it, but also understand the ethical implications,” said Katherine Goyette, the state education department’s computer science coordinator. “AI is here. We need to teach students and educators how to learn with it, and learn about it.”

And even if colleges prohibit essays whose provenance is generative AI, nabbing a student for robotic plagiarism is an imprecise science. The company behind ChatGPT shut down its own tool for detecting text generated by AI in July, citing a high rate of human-derived text that the application flagged as written by AI. One scholar in a Wired article noted that even a 1% rate of false-positives is inexcusable, because for every 1,000 essays, that’s 10 students who could be accused of an academic theft they didn’t commit.

JR Gonzalez, chief technology officer for the Los Angeles County Office of Education, noted that no AI detection tool is 100% accurate. And AI itself can occasionally produce wrong information. 

Varying policies on AI in admissions essays

Common App, the college application tool used by 1,000 institutions nationwide , in August included a restriction on “substantive” AI use in college admissions applications as part of its fraud policy . The addition was a response to feedback from member colleges and an internal desire to “keep up with the changing technologies,” a spokesperson wrote.

What does “substantive” mean? Common App’s CEO, Jenny Rickard, said there’s no definition, and that’s intentional, writing in an email that “we will evaluate the totality of the circumstances to determine if a student truly intended to misrepresent content generated by AI technology as their own work.”

Common App doesn’t determine whether students are being honest — that’s up to the member colleges to figure out. But if Common App concludes that a student plagiarized, that student’s account may be terminated and Common App will notify the campuses to which the student applied, Rickard wrote.

University of Southern California, which uses the Common App exclusively to process its admissions and is a top choice for Common App applicants , is less lenient.

“Were we to learn that an applicant had used generative AI for any part of their application, their application would be immediately rejected,” the university said in a written statement. The school turned down CalMatters’ request to interview an admissions official.

But the stern words lack teeth. The highly selective private university isn’t employing any AI-detection software, a spokesperson wrote.

The University of California and its nine undergraduate campuses permit students to use generative AI in admissions essays in limited form, such as “advice on content and editing,” but “content and final written text must be their own,” its written policy states . Unlike the state’s private campuses, UC operates its own admissions portal.

But the UC Office of the President, which turned down a CalMatters request for an interview on the topic, wouldn’t specify how it detects whether students relied on AI tools to write their essays. “UC conducts regular screenings to verify the integrity of the responses, may request authentication of the content or writing as the student’s, and will take action when it is determined that the integrity of the response is compromised,” including plagiarism through AI, its guidance states.

A UC spokesperson, Ryan King, suggested students are wasting their effort by relying on AI generative tools, writing “it would be more work for them to try building a strong ChatGPT prompt than it would be to develop their own original responses to the (essay questions).”

Campuses that responded to CalMatters indicated that while generative AI can be a source to spitball ideas, structure an outline and generally shape the essay-writing process, the tools are no match for human voices to communicate nuance and how an applicant’s life experiences tie into the various essay questions. There’s also limited room for the banal writing AI tools typically generate — the Common App essay response can’t exceed 650 words while UC’s four essays are capped at 350 words each.  

Pomona College, a highly selective institution that accepts applications through the Common App, has no formal policy on AI use in admissions essays, though its director of admissions thinks it’s “not very good at nuance, personalization or helping a student communicate in their authentic voice, which is what we’re really looking for when we evaluate an application,” wrote Adam Sapp in an email.

“The value of a 350-word response on topics like leadership, resiliency, or creativity may be diminished if it doesn’t directly reflect a student’s own experiences,” noted UC Riverside’s director of undergraduate admissions, Veronica Zendejas, in email.

Responses from Stanford University and UC Berkeley relayed similar sentiments.

“We want our students to understand how AI works and how to leverage it, but also understand the ethical implications.” Katherine Goyette, computer science coordinator at the california department of education

Zendejas offers practical tips for crafting anxiety-inducing essay responses, telling prospective students to “write in clear, straightforward prose, much like they would in an interview or a conversation. This approach should alleviate concerns about the need for AI tools to assist in writing their responses.”

University of San Francisco, another Common App partner, won’t use AI detection software for college applications because the campus doesn’t think it’s necessary. The full picture of a student’s fit on campus comes into view from their grades, letters of recommendation and other aspects of the holistic application review, said the university’s associate provost who oversees undergraduate admissions, Sherie Gilmore-Cleveland, in an interview.

Gilmore-Cleveland said after a student’s high school academics, the essay is the second-most important factor in a student’s application at University of San Francisco. But in her 20-plus years of working in admissions, she’s never encountered a student with weak grades and a strong essay who was admitted. Other admissions officers have also questioned how much of a boost an essay gives an applicant. 

However, a student with good grades and an awful essay may be rejected from the university if they’re trying to apply for a competitive major. The student may be re-routed to another major, or just be rejected outright — it’s a case-by-case basis, Gilmore-Cleveland said.

Using generative AI is easy

But not everyone applying to college with an essay component is a good writer, said Jeffrey Hancock, a Stanford University professor of communication . “They’ll probably find that they do better when they use a tool like this,” Hancock said of applicants using generative AI.

Hancock said students with no coding experience can train a tool like ChatGPT, especially the latest premium version, to generate strong essays, in a process known as fine-tuning.

First, an applicant pastes essays of students who were admitted to top colleges into an AI tool. The student tells the tool to analyze the essays for positive traits. Then, the applicant pastes essays from students who were rejected from schools and prompts the AI to look for patterns to avoid. Along the way, the student confirms the AI tool is understanding the task. “Do you understand the difference between the two, and it would say ‘yes, I’ve found this pattern versus that pattern,’” Hancock said.

Finally, the student prompts the tool to generate a rough draft based on those findings.

Hancock co-published a peer-reviewed study in March showing that humans can detect AI-written work about as accurately as predicting a coin toss — meaning poorly. And “as you build detectors, the AI gets better,” Hancock said, adding that he anticipates an arms race between detection and evasion.

And while generative AI may be the latest cause célèbre, it’s part of a long line of help students have been able to access for decades. Teachers, counselors and family members offer students writing support. So can pricey tutors, who — even if they’re ethically opposed to writing an essay for a student — can still provide tailored coaching in a way that’s inaccessible to most low-income students. 

“As you build detectors, the AI gets better,” Hancock said, adding that he anticipates an arms race between detection and evasion.

The debate over AI use in college applications reflects a larger trend in classrooms. Educators are deciding how to adapt to artificial intelligence, especially as it improves and becomes more ubiquitous. Some districts have yet to address the issue, while others have adopted comprehensive guidelines promoting its benefits and warning of its dangers.

The Los Angeles County Office of Education held an AI symposium last summer for hundreds of educators, and is crafting guidelines for the 80 districts it oversees. Despite AI’s obvious risks, the most obvious benefits, according to Gonzalez, are for teachers and administrators: creating lesson plans, making master schedules, tracking student achievement and attendance, writing grant applications and even crafting state-mandated accountability plans.

Christine Elgersma, senior editor for learning content strategy at Common Sense Media, a research and advocacy nonprofit, suggests that schools move forward thoughtfully as they create AI policies and include students in the discussion. Students should understand the ethical implications, the biases that exist in AI algorithms, the potential for misinformation and the privacy risks.

“Since college essays are so personal, it brings up a question of privacy,” Elgersma said. “For example, pieces of your story could turn up folded into another student’s AI-generated essay.”

Students should also understand the value of learning to write, and think, independently, “developing your own ideas and expressing yourself in words, with clarity and profundity and a flair that’s your own,” she said. 

Tara Sorkhabi, a senior at Monte Vista High School in Danville, said her teachers have been clear in discouraging, if not outright banning, the use of AI for writing assignments. While Sorkhabi has found AI useful in studying chemistry, for example, she does not believe students should use it for college application essays.

“Admissions officers wouldn’t know who they’re accepting. They’d basically be admitting a bot,” she said.

She also thinks that allowing AI in college application essays is unfair to students who toil for weeks perfecting their own essays without the help of machines.

Reed, the Fremont High senior, said students who over-rely on AI for writing assignments are ultimately cheating themselves, because they’re not learning valuable skills like research, expression and critical thinking. 

“It’s your future,” Reed said, noting that students should take advantage of opportunities to expand their minds, not use short-cuts. “You can’t plagiarize in school. You can’t do it at work. People like AI because it’s quick and easy, but it’s not good.”

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AI-assisted writing is quietly booming in academic journals. Here’s why that’s OK

Lecturer in Bioethics, Monash University & Honorary fellow, Melbourne Law School, Monash University

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Julian Koplin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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If you search Google Scholar for the phrase “ as an AI language model ”, you’ll find plenty of AI research literature and also some rather suspicious results. For example, one paper on agricultural technology says:

As an AI language model, I don’t have direct access to current research articles or studies. However, I can provide you with an overview of some recent trends and advancements …

Obvious gaffes like this aren’t the only signs that researchers are increasingly turning to generative AI tools when writing up their research. A recent study examined the frequency of certain words in academic writing (such as “commendable”, “meticulously” and “intricate”), and found they became far more common after the launch of ChatGPT – so much so that 1% of all journal articles published in 2023 may have contained AI-generated text.

(Why do AI models overuse these words? There is speculation it’s because they are more common in English as spoken in Nigeria, where key elements of model training often occur.)

The aforementioned study also looks at preliminary data from 2024, which indicates that AI writing assistance is only becoming more common. Is this a crisis for modern scholarship, or a boon for academic productivity?

Who should take credit for AI writing?

Many people are worried by the use of AI in academic papers. Indeed, the practice has been described as “ contaminating ” scholarly literature.

Some argue that using AI output amounts to plagiarism. If your ideas are copy-pasted from ChatGPT, it is questionable whether you really deserve credit for them.

But there are important differences between “plagiarising” text authored by humans and text authored by AI. Those who plagiarise humans’ work receive credit for ideas that ought to have gone to the original author.

By contrast, it is debatable whether AI systems like ChatGPT can have ideas, let alone deserve credit for them. An AI tool is more like your phone’s autocomplete function than a human researcher.

The question of bias

Another worry is that AI outputs might be biased in ways that could seep into the scholarly record. Infamously, older language models tended to portray people who are female, black and/or gay in distinctly unflattering ways, compared with people who are male, white and/or straight.

This kind of bias is less pronounced in the current version of ChatGPT.

However, other studies have found a different kind of bias in ChatGPT and other large language models : a tendency to reflect a left-liberal political ideology.

Any such bias could subtly distort scholarly writing produced using these tools.

The hallucination problem

The most serious worry relates to a well-known limitation of generative AI systems: that they often make serious mistakes.

For example, when I asked ChatGPT-4 to generate an ASCII image of a mushroom, it provided me with the following output.

It then confidently told me I could use this image of a “mushroom” for my own purposes.

These kinds of overconfident mistakes have been referred to as “ AI hallucinations ” and “ AI bullshit ”. While it is easy to spot that the above ASCII image looks nothing like a mushroom (and quite a bit like a snail), it may be much harder to identify any mistakes ChatGPT makes when surveying scientific literature or describing the state of a philosophical debate.

Unlike (most) humans, AI systems are fundamentally unconcerned with the truth of what they say. If used carelessly, their hallucinations could corrupt the scholarly record.

Should AI-produced text be banned?

One response to the rise of text generators has been to ban them outright. For example, Science – one of the world’s most influential academic journals – disallows any use of AI-generated text .

I see two problems with this approach.

The first problem is a practical one: current tools for detecting AI-generated text are highly unreliable. This includes the detector created by ChatGPT’s own developers, which was taken offline after it was found to have only a 26% accuracy rate (and a 9% false positive rate ). Humans also make mistakes when assessing whether something was written by AI.

It is also possible to circumvent AI text detectors. Online communities are actively exploring how to prompt ChatGPT in ways that allow the user to evade detection. Human users can also superficially rewrite AI outputs, effectively scrubbing away the traces of AI (like its overuse of the words “commendable”, “meticulously” and “intricate”).

The second problem is that banning generative AI outright prevents us from realising these technologies’ benefits. Used well, generative AI can boost academic productivity by streamlining the writing process. In this way, it could help further human knowledge. Ideally, we should try to reap these benefits while avoiding the problems.

The problem is poor quality control, not AI

The most serious problem with AI is the risk of introducing unnoticed errors, leading to sloppy scholarship. Instead of banning AI, we should try to ensure that mistaken, implausible or biased claims cannot make it onto the academic record.

After all, humans can also produce writing with serious errors, and mechanisms such as peer review often fail to prevent its publication.

We need to get better at ensuring academic papers are free from serious mistakes, regardless of whether these mistakes are caused by careless use of AI or sloppy human scholarship. Not only is this more achievable than policing AI usage, it will improve the standards of academic research as a whole.

This would be (as ChatGPT might say) a commendable and meticulously intricate solution.

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Educators see a role for ai in college admissions essays, many educators and college faculty are ok with students consulting chatgpt for help on admissions essays, but chatbots can't be a replacement for a student's own voice, subjective experience and thoughts..

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Ethical concerns, 'paralysis of the blinking cursor'.

Half of College Students Would Have Used AI on Admissions Essay: Survey

Higher Education Research Analyst

Editorial Director

Data Summary

• Check The majority of college students (56%) believe using AI tools on college applications would give some applicants an unfair advantage.
• Check However, 4 in 10 college students (39%) say using AI tools on admissions applications would improve access and opportunities for traditionally underserved students.
• Check In general, students are evenly split on whether applicants should be allowed to use AI tools on college applications, but opinions vary by gender, generation, level of educational attainment, and first-generation student status.
• Check Just 35% of college students would trust admissions offices to use AI in admissions decisions.
• Check Half of college students (50%) also say colleges should screen for the use of AI on applications.

This report is part of BestColleges' 2023 College Choice and Admissions Survey .

Roughly one year ago, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT , an AI-powered chatbot that can produce and organize chunks of text in seconds flat. The tool and others like it threaten the status quo in higher education —from how students complete assignments to how professors design courses and, now, the college admissions process.

In a survey of 1,000 current undergraduate and graduate students, nearly half of participants (47%) say they would have used AI tools like ChatGPT to help complete their college admissions essays if tools had been available. Four in 10 (40%) disagree, and 10% didn't complete an essay as part of their application.

Older students, graduate students, men, and first-generation college students are more likely to report that they would have used AI to help write an admissions essay.

In fact, 62% of millennials versus 39% of Gen Z students say they would have turned to AI. And 60% of graduate students, compared to 44% of undergraduates, would have used AI on their essays if the tools had been available. For context, over half of graduate students in the survey (54%) are Gen Z.

Additionally, men are more likely than women to say they would have used AI tools to complete their college admissions essays if they were available (60% vs. 36%).

And, almost 6 in 10 first-generation college students (58%) said they would have used AI tools to complete their college admissions essays if tools were available to them, compared to 33% of non-first-generation college students.

Is Using AI on College Admissions Essays Acceptable?

Most college students (56%) agree that using AI tools on college applications would unfairly advantage some applicants. Twenty-nine percent disagree, and one-quarter (25%) are neutral.

However, 39% of students say using AI tools on college applications would improve access and opportunities for traditionally underserved students. Three in 10 (30%) disagree, and 32% are neutral.

Students are evenly split on whether applicants should be allowed to use AI tools on admissions applications: 37% agree, 37% disagree, and the rest (26%) are neutral. However, opinions vary among student groups.

Millennials (49%), men (48%), Black students (47%), and first-generation college students (45%) are more likely than the total of all students surveyed to say that colleges should allow the use of AI tools on admissions applications.

In comparison, Gen Z (32%), women (29%), white students (35%), and non-first-generation college students (28%) are less likely to agree.

Discover More Data About AI Use in College

The majority of college students (56%) report having used AI on assignments or exams. In addition, 54% say the use of AI tools on coursework counts as cheating.

Students Divided on the Issue of AI and Equity

These days, the personal statement could carry more weight in admissions decisions than ever — offering universities a way to maintain diversity following the Supreme Court's affirmative action ruling.

Half of Black students (50%), 42% of Hispanic and Latino/a students, and 34% of white students say using AI tools on college admissions essays would boost opportunities for traditionally underserved students.

Millennials (47%), men (47%), and first-generation students (44%) are also more likely than the total of all students to agree that the use of AI on admissions essays would improve opportunities for underserved students.

According to a 2020 Urban Institute report, Black and Hispanic students are underrepresented at selective universities. Men and millennials are also minorities in higher education, per the National Student Clearinghouse's spring 2023 enrollment data. First-generation students represent 37% of college students.

Students Cautious of Colleges Using AI

Half of students agree that schools should screen for AI on college applications, with little divergence between most student groups. Just 2 in 10 students (20%) think colleges should not screen for the use of AI in admissions applications, and 30% are neutral.

Colleges are in the early stages of using AI. According to a 2023 Inside Higher Ed report, 38% of campus chief information officers say they're considering experimenting with AI —mostly for instructional purposes and simple administrative tasks such as scheduling and communications.

At the same time, college students are generally wary about the prospect of colleges using AI to review applications and accept applicants.

Just 35% of college students say they would trust colleges to use AI tools to help make college admissions decisions. Forty-two percent disagree — in other words, they would not trust colleges to use AI tools in college admission decisions —and 23% are neutral.

Only slightly more college students (38%) would trust colleges to use AI tools to process and sort through college applications. Meanwhile, 36% disagree, and 26% are neutral.

The same student groups that favored allowing students to use AI on college applications were more likely to say they trusted colleges to use AI to help make admissions decisions: millennials (47%), men (47%), first-generation students (45%), and Black students (44%).

Methodology

This survey was conducted from Sept. 29-Oct. 5, 2023, and was fielded by Pure Spectrum. Survey participants included 1,000 respondents nationwide who were currently enrolled in an on-campus, online, or hybrid undergraduate or graduate degree program. Respondents were 17-49 years of age, with the majority (95%) ages 18-38, and currently pursuing an associate, bachelor's, master's, doctoral, or professional degree. The respondents for the survey were screened by various quality checks, including systems like Relevant ID, and responses were manually reviewed to ensure consistency and accuracy.

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A.I. Could Be Great for College Essays

Every year, the artificial intelligence company OpenAI improves its text-writing bot, GPT. And every year, the internet responds with shrieks of woe about the impending end of human-penned prose. This cycle repeated last week when OpenAI launched ChatGPT —a version of GPT that can seemingly spit out any text, from a Mozart-styled piano piece to the history of London in the style of Dr. Seuss . The response on Twitter was unanimous: The college essay is doomed. Why slave over a paper when ChatGPT can write an original for you?

Chatting with ChatGPT is fun. (Go play with it !) But the college essay isn’t doomed, and A.I. like ChatGPT won’t replace flesh and blood writers. They may make writing easier, though.

GPT-3, released by OpenAI in 2020, is the third and best-known version of OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer—a computer program known as a large language model. Large language models produce language in response to language—typically, text-based prompts (“Write me a sonnet about love”). Unlike traditional computer programs that execute a series of hard-coded commands, language models are trained by sifting through large datasets of text like Wikipedia. Through this training, they learn patterns in language that are then used to generate the most likely completions to questions or commands.

Language is rife with repetition. Our ability to recognize and remember regularities in speech and text allows us to do things like complete a friend’s sentence or solve a Wordle in three tries. If I asked you to finish the sentence, The ball rolled down the … you’d say hill, and so would GPT-3. Large language models are, like people, great at learning regularities in language, and they use this trick to generate human-like text. But when tested on their ability to understand the language they produce, they often look more like parrots than poets.

Gary Marcus, an emeritus professor at NYU and the author of Rebooting AI , is a vocal critic of the idea that bots like GPT-3 understand what they’re writing . In a recent preprint (an academic paper that hasn’t been peer-reviewed), Marcus and two co-authors used OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 to demonstrate the limitations of large language models. DALL-E 2 , like GPT-3, responds to text-based prompts. But instead of producing language, it creates images. DALL-E 2 was trained to learn associations between images and their captions to produce entirely new images based on the text users enter. If you ask it for, say, “an impressionist painting of Albert Einstein surfing” you get the four images below.

Not bad, right? DALL-E 2 was recently used to win an art competition .

But as Marcus and his co-authors point out in their paper , DALL-E 2 doesn’t understand the relationship between the words that users enter. If, for instance, you ask it to produce an image of “an old man talking to his parents,” you get four images of three people talking. The AI fails to understand that, however old the old man looks, the people he’s talking to must, by definition of being his parents, look older.

Compared with DALL-E 2, ChatGPT appears to have a better grasp of the text users enter and the responses it spits out. This might be why the Internet responded to its release so enthusiastically. ChatGPT “is causing jaws to drop and brows to furrow,” wrote Axios .

I had trouble stumping it with some classic riddles from cognitive psychology. Take the Lily Pad problem:

Prompt: A lily pad, in a pond, doubles in size every day. On the 20 th day, it covers the entire pond. On what day did it cover half the pond?

ChatGPT: A lily pad in a pond that doubles in size every day will cover half the pond on the 19 th day, one day before it covers the entire pond.

The A.I. got that the question described exponential growth—a phenomenon that, as the pandemic demonstrated, many humans fail to understand. But I did fool ChatGPT with the bat and ball problem made famous by Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow :

Prompt: A bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

ChatGPT: If the bat costs $1 more than the ball, and the bat and ball cost $1.10 in total, then the ball must cost $1.10 - $1.00 = $0.10.

The correct answer is 5 cents. (Trust me.)

ChatGPT might fail at tests of reasoning, but it’s great at generating humanlike text to different lengths and in various styles. This brings us back to the college essay—an easy task for ChatGPT, many commentators claimed on Twitter. “We’re witnessing the death of the college essay in realtime,” tweeted one Google employee . Ethan Mollick, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania, had ChatGPT write an essay question , create a grading rubric for said question, answer the question, and grade its own answer. (It got an A minus.) How could the essay not be doomed?

This isn’t the first time that large language models have been predicted to fell the essay or worse. “To spend ten minutes with Sudowrite [a GPT-3-based A.I.] is to recognize that the undergraduate essay, the basic pedagogical mode of all humanities, will soon be under severe pressure,” wrote journalist Stephen Marche in a 2021 New Yorker piece. (On Tuesday, Marche wrote an article for the Atlantic titled “ The College Essay Is Dead .”) And in 2019, when GPT-2 was created, OpenAI withheld it from the public because the “fear of malicious applications” was too high .

If any group were to put an A.I. to malicious use, essay-burdened undergraduates would surely be the first. But the evidence that A.I. is being used to complete university assignments is hard to find. (When I asked my class of 47 students recently about using A.I. for schoolwork, they looked at me like I was mad.) It could be a matter of time and access before A.I. is used more widely by students to cheat; ChatGPT is the first free text-writing bot from OpenAI (although it won’t be free forever). But it could also be that large language models are just not very good at answering the types of questions professors ask.

If you ask ChatGPT to write an essay contrasting socialism and capitalism, it produces what you expect: 28 grammatical sentences covering wealth distribution, poverty reduction, and employment stability under these two economic systems. But few professors ask students to write papers on broad questions like this. Broad questions lead to a rainbow of responses that are impossible to grade objectively. And the more you make the question like something a student might get—narrow, and focused on specific, course-related content—the worse ChatGPT performs.

I gave ChatGPT a question about the relationship between language and colour perception, that I ask my third-year psychology of language class, and it bombed . Not only did its response lack detail, but it attributed a paper I instructed it to describe to an entirely different study. Several more questions produced the same vague and error-riddled results. If one of my students handed in the text ChatGPT generated, they’d get an F.

Large language models generate the most likely responses based on the text they are fed during training, and, for now, that text doesn’t include the reading lists of thousands of college classes. They also prevaricate. The model’s calculation of the most probable text completion is not always the most correct response—or even a true response. When I asked Gary Marcus about the prospect of ChatGPT writing college essays his answer was blunt: “It’s basically a bullshit artist. And bullshitters rarely get As—they get Cs or worse.”

If these problems are fixed—and, based on how these models work, it’s unclear that they can be—I doubt A.I. like ChatGPT will produce good papers. Even humans who write papers for money struggle to do it well. In 2014, a department of the U.K. government published a study of history and English papers produced by online-essay writing services for senior high school students. Most of the papers received a grade of C or lower. Much like the work of ChatGPT, the papers were vague and error-filled. It’s hard to write a good essay when you lack detailed, course-specific knowledge of the content that led to the essay question.

ChatGPT may fail at writing a passable paper, but it’s a useful pedagogical tool that could help students write papers themselves. Ben Thompson, who runs the technology blog and newsletter Stratechery, wrote about this change in a post about ChatGPT and history homework. Thompson asked ChatGPT to complete his daughter’s assignment on the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes; the A.I. produced three error-riddled paragraphs. But, as Thompson points out, failures like this don’t mean that we should trash the tech. In the future, A.I. like ChatGPT can be used in the classroom to generate text that students then fact-check and edit. That is, these bots solve the problem of the blank page by providing a starting point for papers. I couldn’t agree more.

I frequently used ChatGPT while working on this piece. I asked for definitions that, after a fact-check, I included. At times, I threw entire paragraphs from this piece into ChatGPT to see if it produced prettier prose. Sometimes it did, and then I used that text. Why not? Like spell check, a thesaurus, and Wikipedia, ChatGPT made the task of writing a little easier. I hope my students use it.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate , New America , and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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10 Best AI Essay Writer Platforms to Help You Get Better Grades

Essays are some of the most common homework assignments for students from middle school all the way through to college. And it’s not always easy to find time to get every essay done on time or write about subjects you struggle with. That’s where AI essay writing platforms can help. Most AI essay writers use powerful natural language technology to generate essays, add citations, use AI to auto-complete essay paragraphs, research subjects, and much more. It’s a powerful learning tool, and this list will look at 10 of the best options to use.

EssayGPT – Best AI Essay Writer Overall

When it comes to the best AI essay writers, EssayGPT by HIX.AI tops the list. It stands out for its highly impressive technology, capable of tackling almost any subject imaginable, from complicated science essays to in-depth literature analysis.

So much more than a simple AI essay writer, EssayGPT also offers editing and auto-complete features, helping students fine-tune and improve their work. It can automatically fill out phrases and sentences with a click, as well as add citations to your essays in various styles to suit the tone and target audience.

But EssayGPT’s feature list doesn’t end there. It also comes with built-in grammar and plagiarism checkers to ensure that your work is free of mistakes. And it has a powerful search tool that students can use to look up relevant and useful information to draw from when completing their essays.

• Industry-leading technology
• A major time-saver to help you hit any deadline
• Much cheaper than a tutor or human-based essay writing services
• Prices can add up if you use it often

Enjoy academic success with EssayGPT.

EssayWriter – Best AI Essay Writer for Researching

EssayWriter is another AI essay generator that can appeal to students at any level of academia. With its advanced technology and deep database of academic resources, it makes it easy for students to look up relevant references and sources connected to the topics they’re writing about, making it faster and easier to create informative and detailed text.

That’s not all. EssayWriter also comes with a simple citation generation, letting you make citations that are formatted to suit common standards, like APA and Chicago. Plus, it has a built-in plagiarism detector to ensure your work is original, coupled with real-time AI content suggestions to help you complete essays more quickly.

• Customizable writing styles and tones
• Sources accurate content from academic sources
• Great value for money
• Requires an internet connection to access

EssayFlow – Best AI Essay Writer for Any Form of Essays

EssayAI is a leading undetectable AI essay generator that stands out on the market. It produces high-quality, undetectable essays in great detail, with expert citations and sources listed throughout, showing you exactly how each point was made and supported.

It offers a range of customization options, allowing you to tailor your essays to specific target audiences, adjust tones of voice, select preferred languages, and more. This level of customization ensures that your essays are precisely crafted to meet your unique requirements and effectively engage your intended audience.

• An excellent undetectable AI essay writer
• Adds lots of quality citations
• Many customization features
• Needs to upgrade to unlock more features

EssayAI – Best AI Essay Writer for Undetectable Academic Writing

ToolBaz – Best AI Essay Writer for Adjustable Creativity

Next on our list is ToolBaz. Launched in 2022, the ToolBaz AI essay writer is part of an extensive suite of AI writing solutions on the ToolBaz platform. It’s fast, reliable, and ready to use at any time, whenever you need it.

This AI essay writer also has a unique adjustable creativity feature. It lets users change the creativity of their essays via a simple slider, giving the AI bot more or less freedom to get imaginative with the content.

• Completely free to use
• Useful for high school, middle school, and more
• Simple, beginner-friendly interface
• Sometimes requires manual editing

Caktus AI – Best AI Essay Writer for Improving Your Knowledge

Caktus AI is an AI essay writer that is trusted by students and teachers alike as a reliable learning aid. Instead of simply doing work for students, this AI platform, founded by Harrison Leonard and Tao Zhang, is designed to teach them and help them improve.

Caktus AI fills its essays with precise citations and the most accurate information, sourced from published essays and academic textbooks. This results in high-quality, easy-to-read output text that can help you improve in even the trickiest subjects, with prices starting at $14.99 per month.

• A vast database of academic resources
• Designed by students, with students in mind
• Flexible pricing to suit your budget
• More expensive than other AI essay generators

Essaybot – Best AI Essay Writer for High School Students

Next up, we have Essaybot. This company was founded in 2023 and has staff both in China and the U.S. It’s quickly become one of the go-to essay generator tools for many students, thanks to its ease-of-use.

With EssayBot, all you have to do is type the subject or concept of your essay into the box provided and then wait for it to create content for you. It’ll generate precise, relevant text for any subject you need help with, adding citations automatically and running a plagiarism check too.

• Very easy for beginner users
• Built-in grammar and spell check
• Offers unlimited essay downloads
• May struggle with college-level texts

StudyCrumb – Best AI Essay Generator to Use for Free

While many AI essay writing platforms charge high fees or recurring subscriptions, StudyCrumb is 100% free. Launched by the Crumb4Life company, which is based in Estonia, this trusty AI essay generator is completely risk-free and perfect to add to your academic arsenal.

Students can easily and quickly get help with any essay through StudyCrumb. It boasts fast processing times and is much more cost-effective than spending money on other tools or paying a human tutor.

• Produces relevant, good quality content
• Fast essay generation
• Intuitive user interface
• Text regularly needs manual editing

EssayService – Best AI Essay Writer for Easy Essay Generation

EssayService is an AI-powered essay generator that was launched in 2023 by a company that had previously specialized in human essay writing services. They decided to branch out into AI, resulting in the development of this clever and easy-to-use AI tool.

With the EssayService AI essay writer, users can paste their questions or subjects into a box and get instant essay generation. It also supports essay outline generation, giving you headers and talking points that you can then flesh out on your own.

• Excellent for custom essay requests
• Draws from a vast database of academic sources 
• Can save you hours on essay writing
• May struggle with complex science essays

PaperTyper – Best AI Essay Writer for Improving Your Essays

PaperTyper isn’t quite the same as the other essay writers on this list. Developed by a one-woman team, Juli Sheller, this tool is part of an entire suite of academic AI aids, including a plagiarism checker, grammar scanner, and more.

In short, PaperType has all you need to write essays, check them, proofread them, and fine-tune them. It’s ideal for students who want to do most of the work themselves, but still want to use AI to make improvements to the clarity and flow of their texts.

• Completely free to start
• Checks grammar and spelling for you
• Works at all levels of education
• Interface may be a little awkward for first-time users

Who Should Use an AI Essay Writer?

So, who are AI essay generators actually aimed at? Well, almost any kind of student can benefit from these tools. It’s important to note that many AI essay writers are capable of writing a range of different kinds of content, from persuasive essays to descriptive papers, analytical texts, and more.

Therefore, it doesn’t matter what level of education you’re at or what kind of work you’ve got to do. Every student can use and benefit from an AI essay generator. What’s more, they’re ideal for students who have very busy lives. As well as those who feel like they don’t have enough time to keep up with their assignments.

You may also enjoy big benefits from AI essay writing technology if you’re the kind of user who tends to struggle with certain subjects. Let’s say that you excel in geography but struggle with history, for instance. In that case, you can use AI to help out with your history essays and ease your stress in that subject.

What Should I Look for in an AI Essay Generator?

With all of those different AI essay writers on the market, you might not know which one you should actually use. Well, here are some key factors that you can focus on when trying to find the right one:

• Reliable Citation Generation : The best AI essay writers make it easy to add citations to your work. Citations help to make essays feel more professional and can aid in getting better grades. Look for writers with built-in citation generators, and favor those that can add citations in different styles, like Chicago and MLA.
• Grammar and Spelling Checks : Leading AI essay writers are also capable of scanning essay text to spot and fix errors. They can get rid of any little typos that could make your essay look rushed, for instance. They can also improve punctuation and grammar to produce a more professional and high quality piece of text.

Research Feature : Top quality AI essay writers should also make researching your essays a lot easier. Many of the best ones come with their own research features to help you look up relevant content. Focus on writers that allow you to find relevant content quickly to save time while writing essays.

Overall, AI essay writers are incredible tools to consider. They can help students in so many ways, easing their essay-related stresses, making their academic lives easier, saving them time, and even saving them money, too. Try one of the top 10 tools listed above and see how an AI essay generator can elevate your education.

This is a   guest post,   created for informational purposes only, and should not be considered as professional advice. Readers are encouraged to conduct their   own research   and consult with relevant experts before making any financial or investment decisions.

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May 13, 2024

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

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AI-assisted writing is quietly booming in academic journals—here's why that's OK

by Julian Koplin, The Conversation

If you search Google Scholar for the phrase " as an AI language model ," you'll find plenty of AI research literature and also some rather suspicious results. For example, one paper on agricultural technology says,

"As an AI language model, I don't have direct access to current research articles or studies. However, I can provide you with an overview of some recent trends and advancements …"

Obvious gaffes like this aren't the only signs that researchers are increasingly turning to generative AI tools when writing up their research. A recent study examined the frequency of certain words in academic writing (such as "commendable," "meticulously" and "intricate"), and found they became far more common after the launch of ChatGPT—so much so that 1% of all journal articles published in 2023 may have contained AI-generated text.

(Why do AI models overuse these words? There is speculation it's because they are more common in English as spoken in Nigeria, where key elements of model training often occur.)

The aforementioned study also looks at preliminary data from 2024, which indicates that AI writing assistance is only becoming more common. Is this a crisis for modern scholarship, or a boon for academic productivity?

Who should take credit for AI writing?

Many people are worried by the use of AI in academic papers. Indeed, the practice has been described as " contaminating " scholarly literature.

Some argue that using AI output amounts to plagiarism. If your ideas are copy-pasted from ChatGPT, it is questionable whether you really deserve credit for them.

But there are important differences between "plagiarizing" text authored by humans and text authored by AI. Those who plagiarize humans' work receive credit for ideas that ought to have gone to the original author.

By contrast, it is debatable whether AI systems like ChatGPT can have ideas, let alone deserve credit for them. An AI tool is more like your phone's autocomplete function than a human researcher.

The question of bias

Another worry is that AI outputs might be biased in ways that could seep into the scholarly record. Infamously, older language models tended to portray people who are female, black and/or gay in distinctly unflattering ways, compared with people who are male, white and/or straight.

This kind of bias is less pronounced in the current version of ChatGPT.

However, other studies have found a different kind of bias in ChatGPT and other large language models : a tendency to reflect a left-liberal political ideology.

Any such bias could subtly distort scholarly writing produced using these tools.

The hallucination problem

The most serious worry relates to a well-known limitation of generative AI systems: that they often make serious mistakes.

For example, when I asked ChatGPT-4 to generate an ASCII image of a mushroom, it provided me with the following output.

It then confidently told me I could use this image of a "mushroom" for my own purposes.

These kinds of overconfident mistakes have been referred to as "AI hallucinations" and " AI bullshit ." While it is easy to spot that the above ASCII image looks nothing like a mushroom (and quite a bit like a snail), it may be much harder to identify any mistakes ChatGPT makes when surveying scientific literature or describing the state of a philosophical debate.

Unlike (most) humans, AI systems are fundamentally unconcerned with the truth of what they say. If used carelessly, their hallucinations could corrupt the scholarly record.

Should AI-produced text be banned?

One response to the rise of text generators has been to ban them outright. For example, Science—one of the world's most influential academic journals—disallows any use of AI-generated text .

I see two problems with this approach.

The first problem is a practical one: current tools for detecting AI-generated text are highly unreliable. This includes the detector created by ChatGPT's own developers, which was taken offline after it was found to have only a 26% accuracy rate (and a 9% false positive rate ). Humans also make mistakes when assessing whether something was written by AI.

It is also possible to circumvent AI text detectors. Online communities are actively exploring how to prompt ChatGPT in ways that allow the user to evade detection. Human users can also superficially rewrite AI outputs, effectively scrubbing away the traces of AI (like its overuse of the words "commendable," "meticulously" and "intricate").

The second problem is that banning generative AI outright prevents us from realizing these technologies' benefits. Used well, generative AI can boost academic productivity by streamlining the writing process. In this way, it could help further human knowledge. Ideally, we should try to reap these benefits while avoiding the problems.

The problem is poor quality control, not AI

The most serious problem with AI is the risk of introducing unnoticed errors, leading to sloppy scholarship. Instead of banning AI, we should try to ensure that mistaken, implausible or biased claims cannot make it onto the academic record.

After all, humans can also produce writing with serious errors, and mechanisms such as peer review often fail to prevent its publication.

We need to get better at ensuring academic papers are free from serious mistakes, regardless of whether these mistakes are caused by careless use of AI or sloppy human scholarship. Not only is this more achievable than policing AI usage, it will improve the standards of academic research as a whole.

This would be (as ChatGPT might say) a commendable and meticulously intricate solution.

Provided by The Conversation

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