using ai to write college essays

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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.

Just $10 to create an AI chatbot of a dead loved one

"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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Using AI ethically in writing assignments

The use of generative artificial intelligence in writing isn’t an either/or proposition. Rather, think of a continuum in which AI can be used at nearly any point to inspire, ideate, structure, and format writing. It can also help with research, feedback, summarization, and creation. You may also choose not to use any AI tools. This handout is intended to help you decide.

A starting point

Many instructors fear that students will use chatbots to complete assignments, bypassing the thinking and intellectual struggle involved in shaping and refining ideas and arguments. That’s a valid concern, and it offers a starting point for discussion:

Turning in unedited AI-generated work as one’s own creation is academic misconduct .

Most instructors agree on that point.  After that, the view of AI becomes murkier. AI is already ubiquitous, and its integrations and abilities will only grow in the coming years. Students in grade school and high school are also using generative AI, and those students will arrive at college with expectations to do the same. So how do we respond?

Writing as process and product

We often think of writing as a product that demonstrates students’ understanding and abilities. It can serve that role, especially in upper-level classes. In most classes, though, we don’t expect perfection. Rather, we want students to learn the process of writing. Even as students gain experience and our expectations for writing quality rise, we don’t expect them to work in a vacuum. They receive feedback from instructors, classmates, friends, and others. They get help from the writing center. They work with librarians. They integrate the style and thinking of sources they draw on. That’s important because thinking about writing as a process involving many types of collaboration helps us consider how generative AI might fit in.   

Generative AI as a writing assistant

We think students can learn to use generative AI effectively and ethically. Again, rather than thinking of writing as an isolated activity, think of it as a process that engages sources, ideas, tools, data, and other people in various ways. Generative AI is simply another point of engagement in that process. Here’s what that might look like at various points:

Early in the process

• Generating ideas . Most students struggle to identify appropriate topics for their writing. Generative AI can offer ideas and provide feedback on students’ ideas.  
• Narrowing the scope of a topic . Most ideas start off too broad, and students often need help in narrowing the scope of writing projects. Instructors and peers already do that. Generative AI becomes just another voice in that process.
• Finding initial sources . Bing and Bard can help students find sources early in the writing process. Specialty tools like Semantic Scholar, Elicit, Prophy, and Dimensions can provide more focused searches, depending on the topic.
• Finding connections among ideas . Research Rabbit, Aria (a plug-in for Zotero) and similar tools can create concept maps of literature, showing how ideas and research are connected. Elicit identifies patterns across papers and points to related research. ChatGPT Pro can also find patterns in written work. When used with a plugin, it can also create word clouds and other visualizations.
• Gathering and formatting references . Software like EndNote and Zotero allow students to store and organize sources. They also save time by formatting sources in whatever style the writer needs.
• Summarizing others’ work . ChatGPT, Bing and specialty AI tools like Elicit do a good job of summarizing research papers and webpages, helping students decide whether a source is worth additional time.
• Interrogating research papers or websites . This is a new approach AI has made possible. An AI tool analyzes a paper (often a PDF) or a website. Then researchers can then ask questions about the content, ideas, approach, or other aspects of a work. Some tools can also provide additional sources related to a paper.
• Analyzing data . Many of the same tools that can summarize digital writing can also create narratives from data, offering new ways of bringing data into written work.
• Finding hidden patterns . Students can have an AI tool analyze their notes or ideas for research, asking it to identify patterns, connections, or structure they might not have seen on their own.
• Outlining . ChatGPT, Bing and other tools do an excellent job of outlining potential articles or papers. That can help students organize their thoughts throughout the research and writing process. Each area of an outline provides another entry point for diving deeper into ideas and potential writing topics.
• Creating an introduction . Many writers struggle with opening sentences or paragraphs. Generative AI can provide a draft of any part of a paper, giving students a boost as they bring their ideas together.

Deeper into the process

• Thinking critically . Creating good prompts for generative AI involves considerable critical thinking. This isn’t a process of asking a single question and receiving perfectly written work. It involves trial and error, clarification and repeated follow-ups. Even after that, students will need to edit, add sources, and check the work for AI-generated fabrication or errors.
• Creating titles or section headers for papers . This is an important but often overlooked part of the writing process, and the headings that generative AI produces can help students spot potential problems in focus.
• Helping with transitions and endings . These are areas where students often struggle or get stuck, just as they do with openings.
• Getting feedback on details . Students might ask an AI tool to provide advice on improving the structure, flow, grammar, and other elements of a paper.
• Getting feedback on a draft . Instructors already provide feedback on drafts of assignments and often have students work with peers to do the same. Students may also seek the help of the writing center or friends. Generative AI can also provide feedback, helping students think through large and small elements of a paper. We don’t see that as a substitute for any other part of the writing process. Rather, it is an addition.

Generative AI has many weaknesses. It is programmed to generate answers whether it has appropriate answers or not. Students can’t blame AI for errors, and they are still accountable for everything they turn in. Instructors need to help them understand both the strengths and the weaknesses of using generative AI, including the importance of checking all details.

A range of AI use

Better understanding of the AI continuum provides important context, but it doesn’t address a question most instructors are asking: How much is too much ? There’s no easy answer to that. Different disciplines may approach the use of generative AI in very different ways. Similarly, instructors may set different boundaries for different types of assignments or levels of students. Here are some ways to think through an approach:

• Discuss ethics . What are the ethical foundations of your field? What principles should guide students? Do students know and understand those principles? What happens to professionals who violate those principles?
• Be honest . Most professions, including academia, are trying to work through the very issues instructors are. We are all experimenting and trying to define boundaries even as the tools and circumstances change. Students need to understand those challenges. We should also bring students into conversations about appropriate use of generative AI. Many of them have more experience with AI than instructors do, and adding their voices to discussions will make it more likely that students will follow whatever guidelines we set.  
• Set boundaries . You may ask students to avoid, for instance, AI for creating particular assignments or for generating complete drafts of assignments. (Again, this may vary by discipline.) Just make sure students understand why you want them to avoid AI use and how forgoing AI assistance will help them develop skills they need to succeed in future classes and in the professional world.
• Review your assignments . If AI can easily complete them, students may not see the value or purpose. How can you make assignments more authentic, focusing on real-world problems and issues students are likely to see in the workplace?
• Scaffold assignments . Having students create assignments in smaller increments reduces pressure and leads to better overall work.
• Include reflection . Have students think of AI as a method and have them reflect on their use of AI. This might be a paragraph or two at the end of a written assignment in which they explain what AI tools they have used, how they have used those tools, and what AI ultimately contributed to their written work. Also have them reflect on the quality of the material AI provided and on what they learned from using the AI tools. This type of reflection helps students develop metacognitive skills (thinking about their own thinking). It also provides important information to instructors about how students are approaching assignments and what additional revisions they might need to make.
• Engage with the Writing Center, KU Libraries , and other campus services about AI, information literacy, and the writing process. Talk with colleagues and watch for advice from disciplinary societies. This isn’t something you have to approach alone.

Generative AI is evolving rapidly. Large numbers of tools have incorporated it, and new tools are proliferating. Step back and consider how AI has already become part of academic life:  

• AI-augmented tools like spell-check and auto-correct brought grumbles, but there was no panic.
• Grammar checkers followed, offering advice on word choice, sentence construction, and other aspects of writing. Again, few people complained.
• Citation software has evolved along with word-processing programs, easing the collection, organization, and formatting of sources.
• Search engines used AI long before generative AI burst into the public consciousness.

As novel as generative AI may seem, it offers nothing new in the way of cheating. Students could already buy papers on the internet, copy and paste from an online site, have someone else create a paper for them, or tweak a paper from the files of a fraternity or a sorority. So AI isn’t the problem. AI has simply forced instructors to deal with long-known issues in academic structure, grading, distrust, and purpose. That is beyond the scope of this handout, other than some final questions for thought:

Why are we so suspicious of student intentions? And how can we create an academic climate that values learning and honesty?

(Updated July 2024)

Other AI-Related Materials

• Helping Students Understand the Biases in Generative AI
• Maintaining Academic Integrity in the AI Era
• AI as a Tutor on Research Projects

Additional resources

Research on ai and writing.

Ai.llude: Encouraging Rewriting AI-Generated Text to Support Creative Expression , by David Zhou and Sarah Sterman. Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition (28 May 2024).

AI and Its Consequences for the Written Word , by Thomas Helstrom. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 6 (4 January 2024).

AI and Writing Classrooms: A Study of Purposeful Use and Student Responses to the Technology , by Laura Dumin. Teaching and Generative AI , Beth Buyserie and Travis N. Thurston, eds., chapter 8. Utah State University, 2024.

AI vs. Human-Authored Texts: A Multidimensional Comparison , by Tony Berber Sardinha. Applied Corpus Linguistics 4 (April 2024).

ChatGPT: A Powerful Technology Tool for Writing Instruction , by Sarah W. Beck and Sarah R. Levine. Phi Delta Kappan 105 (28 August 2023).

ChatGPT Is Bullshit , by Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries, and Joe Slater.  Ethics and Information Technology  26 (2024).

Embracing AI in English Composition: Insights and Innovations in Hybrid Pedagogical Practices , by James Hutson, Daniel Plate, and Kadence Berry.  International Journal of Changes in Education  1 (2024):19-31.

Exploring an AI-based Writing Assistant's Impact on English Language Learners , by John Maurice Gayed, May Kristine Jonson Carlon, Angelu Mari Oriola, and Jeffrey S. Cross. Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence  3 (2022).

Improving Writing Feedback for Struggling Writers: Generative AI to the Rescue? , by Anya S. Evmenova, Kelley Regan, Reagan Mergen, and Roba Hrisseh.  TechTrends  (14 May 2024).

The Use of ChatGPT in Creative Writing Assistance , by Svitlana Fiialka, Zoia Kornieva, and Tamara Honcharuk.  XLinguae: European Scientific Language Journal 17 (January 2024) 

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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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Generative AI in Academic Writing

What this handout is about.

You’ve likely heard of AI tools such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, or others by now. These tools fall under a broad, encompassing term called generative AI that describes technology that can create new text, images, sounds, video, etc. based on information and examples drawn from the internet. Some AI tools are free or offer free tiers, while others require a subscription and payment. In this handout, we will focus on potential uses and pitfalls of generative AI tools that generate text.

Before we begin: Stay tuned to your instructor

Instructors’ opinions on the use of AI tools may vary dramatically from one class to the next, so don’t assume that all of your instructors will think alike on this topic. Consult each syllabus for guidance or requirements related to the use of AI tools. If you have questions about if/how/when it may be appropriate to use generative AI in your coursework, be sure to seek input from your instructor before you turn something in for a grade. You are always 100% responsible for whatever writing you chose to turn in to an instructor, so it pays to inquire early.

Note that when your instructors authorize the use of generative AI tools, they will likely assume that these tools may help you think and write—not think or write for you. Keep that principle in mind when you are drafting and revising your assignments. You can maintain your academic integrity and employ the tools with the same high ethical standards and source use practices that you use in any piece of academic writing.

What is generative AI, and how does it work?

Generative AI is an artificial intelligence tool that allows users to ask it questions or make requests and receive quick written responses. It uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze vast amounts of textual data to determine patterns in words and phrases. Detecting patterns allows LLMs to predict what words may follow other words and to transform the content of its corpus (the textual data) into new sentences that respond to the questions or requests. Using complex neural network models, LLMs generate writing that mimics human intelligence and varied writing styles.

The textual data used to train the LLM has been scraped from the internet, though it is unclear exactly which sources have been included in the corpus for each AI tool. As you can imagine, the internet has a vast array of content of variable quality and utility, and generative AI does not distinguish between accurate/inaccurate or biased/unbiased information. It can also recombine accurate source information in ways that generate inaccurate statements, so it’s important to be discerning when you use these tools and to carefully digest what’s generated for you. That said, the AI tools may spark ideas, save you time, offer models, and help you improve your writing skills. Just plan to bring your critical thinking skills to bear as you begin to experiment with and explore AI tools.

As you explore the world of generative AI tools, note that there are both free and paid versions. Some require you to create an account, while others don’t. Whatever tools you experiment with, take the time to read the terms before you proceed, especially the terms about how they will use your personal data and prompt history.

In order to generate responses from AI tools, you start by asking a question or making a request, called a “prompt.” Prompting is akin to putting words into a browser’s search bar, but you can make much more sophisticated requests from AI tools with a little practice. Just as you learned to use Google or other search engines by using keywords or strings, you will need to experiment with how you can extract responses from generative AI tools. You can experiment with brief prompts and with prompts that include as much information as possible, like information about the goal, the context, and the constraints.

You could experiment with some fun requests like “Create an itinerary for a trip to a North Carolina beach.” You may then refine your prompt to “Create an itinerary for a relaxing weekend at Topsail Beach and include restaurant recommendations” or “Create an itinerary for a summer weekend at Topsail Beach for teenagers who hate water sports.” You can experiment with style by refining the prompt to “Rephrase the itinerary in the style of a sailor shanty.” Look carefully at the results for each version of the prompt to see how your changes have shaped the answers.

The more you experiment with generative AI for fun, the more knowledgeable and prepared you will be to use the tool responsibly if you have occasion to use it for your academic work. Here are some ways you might experiment with generative AI tools when drafting or exploring a topic for a paper.

Potential uses

Brainstorming/exploring the instructor’s prompt Generative AI can help spark ideas or categories for brainstorming. You could try taking key words from your topic and asking questions about these ideas or concepts. As you narrow in on a topic, you can ask more specific or in-depth questions.

Based on the answers that you get from the AI tool, you may identify some topics, ideas, or areas you are interested in researching further. At this point, you can start exploring credible academic sources, visit your instructor’s office hours to discuss topic directions, meet with a research librarian for search strategies, etc.

Generating outlines AI tools can generate outlines of writing project timelines, slide presentations, and a variety of writing tasks. You can revise the prompt to generate several versions of the outlines that include, exclude, and prioritize different information. Analyze the output to spark your own thinking about how you’d like to structure the draft you’re working on.

Models of genres or types of writing If you are uncertain how to approach a new format or type of writing, an AI tool may quickly generate an example that may inform how you develop your draft. For example, you may never have written—a literature review, a cover letter for an internship, or an abstract for a research project. With good prompting, an AI tool may show you what type of written product you are aiming to develop, including typical components of that genre and examples. You can analyze the output for the sequence of information to help you get a sense of the structure of that genre, but be cautious about relying on the actual information (see pitfalls below). You can use what you learn about the structures to develop drafts with your own content.

Summarizing longer texts You can put longer texts into the AI tool and ask for a summary of the key points. You can use the summary as a guide to orient you to the text. After reading the summary, you can read the full text to analyze how the author has shaped the argument, to get the important details, and to capture important points that the tool may have omitted from the summary.

Editing/refining AI tools can help you improve your text at the sentence level. While sometimes simplistic, AI-generated text is generally free of grammatical errors. You can insert text you have written into an AI tool and ask it to check for grammatical errors or offer sentence level improvements. If this draft will be turned into your instructor, be sure to check your instructor’s policies on using AI for coursework.

As an extension of editing and revising, you may be curious about what AI can tell you about your own writing. For example, after asking AI tools to fix grammatical and punctuation errors in your text, compare your original and the AI edited version side-by-side. What do you notice about the changes that were made? Can you identify patterns in these changes? Do you agree with the changes that were made? Did AI make your writing more clear? Did it remove your unique voice? Writing is always a series of choices you make. Just because AI suggests a change, doesn’t mean you need to make it, but understanding why it was suggested may help you take a different perspective on your writing.

Translation You can prompt generative AI tools to translate text or audio into different languages for you. But similar to tools like Google Translate, these translations are not considered completely “fluent.” Generative AI can struggle with things like idiomatic phrases, context, and degree of formality.

Transactional communication Academic writing can often involve transactional communication—messages that move the writing project forward. AI tools can quickly generate drafts of polite emails to professors or classmates, meeting agendas, project timelines, event promotions, etc. Review each of the results and refine them appropriately for your audiences and purposes.

Potential pitfalls

Information may be false AI tools derive their responses by reassembling language in their data sets, most of which has been culled from the internet. As you learned long ago, not everything you read on the internet is true, so it follows that not everything culled and reassembled from the internet is true either. Beware of clearly written, but factually inaccurate or misleading responses from AI tools. Additionally, while they can appear to be “thinking,” they are literally assembling language–without human intelligence. They can produce information that seems plausible, but is in fact partly or entirely fabricated or fictional. The tendency for AI tools to invent information is sometimes referred to as “hallucinating.”

Citations and quotes may be invented AI responses may include citations (especially if you prompt them to do so), but beware. While the citations may seem reasonable and look correctly formatted, they may, in fact, not exist or be incorrect. For example, the tools may invent an author, produce a book title that doesn’t exist or incorrectly attribute language to an author who didn’t write the quote or wrote something quite different. Your instructors are conversant in the fields you are writing about and may readily identify these errors. Generative AI tools are not authoritative sources.

Responses may contain biases Again, AI tools are drawing from vast swaths of language from their data sets–and everything and anything has been said there. Accordingly, the tools mimic and repeat distortions in ideas on any topic in which bias easily enters in. Consider and look for biases in responses generated by AI tools.

You risk violating academic integrity standards When you prompt an AI tool, you may often receive a coherent, well written—and sometimes tempting—response. Unless you have received explicit, written guidance from an instructor on use of AI generated text, do not assume it is okay to copy and paste or paraphrase that language into your text—maybe at all. See your instructor’s syllabus and consult with them about how they authorize the use of AI tools and how they expect you to include citations for any content generated by the tool. The AI tools should help you to think and write, not think or write for you. You may find yourself violating the honor code if you are not thoughtful or careful in your use of any AI generated material.

The tools consume personal or private information (text or images) Do not input anything you prefer not to have widely shared into an AI generator. The tools take whatever you put in to a prompt and incorporate it into its systems for others to use.

Your ideas may be changed unacceptably When asked to paraphrase or polish a piece of writing, the tools can change the meaning. Be discerning and thorough in reviewing any generated responses to ensure the meaning captures and aligns with your own understanding.

A final note

Would you like to learn more about using AI in academic writing? Take a look at the modules in Carolina AI Literacy and the UNC Libraries’ Student Guide to AI Literacy . Acquainting yourself with these tools may be important as your thinking and writing skills grow. While these tools are new and still under development, they may be essential tools for you to understand in your current academic life and in your career after you leave the university. Beginning to experiment with and develop an understanding of the tools at this stage may serve you well along the way.

Note: This tip sheet was created in July 2023. Generative AI technology is evolving quickly. We will update the document as the technology and university landscapes change.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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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.

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University Writing Program

Ai writing in the college classroom.

Written by Nate Brown

Attendant to the rise of powerful artificial intelligence (AI) technologies like ChatGPT 4, Perplexity, Jasper, YouChat, Chatsonic, and others, instructors in higher education must consider how students and teachers will (or will not) use AI tools in the classroom and beyond. 

There is already ample evidence that AI technologies built on large language models (LLMs) can produce text, images, and computer code essentially indistinguishable from work produced by humans. Ethan Mollick at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania has signaled cautious optimism about AI’s potential to save time on iterative technical and compositional tasks in the workplace. AI skeptics, on the other hand, express concern about the use of the technology to produce false or misleading information and/or to misrepresent authorship. 

As of this writing, there is a clear prerogative to help students navigate these new tools so that their original intellectual efforts and products are presented responsibly and assessed fairly.  

In what follows, we lay out four starting assumptions about AI that guide our recommendations. These first principles are drawn from the current literature and may be helpful to discuss with students to ensure that everyone is on the same page regarding AI’s capabilities. Then, we suggest five best practices for using AI in the classroom.  

Starting Principles

1. ai is here to stay.  .

Generative AI is already widely available to populations around the globe, which means that it’s incumbent upon professors and teaching assistants to familiarize themselves with the current AI landscape and to develop clear AI policies for their own courses.

2. Generative AI cannot create novel material in a traditional sense.

As Mollick points out, the terms associated with various generative AI technologies are still ill-defined but describe algorithmic systems that use large data sets to “[predict] what the next word in a sentence should be so it can write a paragraph for you [and] what an image should look like based on a prompt.” 

In other words, generative AI creates new combinations of extant language, images, and computer code when prompted to do so. 

The ethical considerations here are vast, but of particular importance in the classroom is a reminder to students that their original thoughts, analyses, scholarship, and labor are central to their educational development and to the advancement of intellectual and academic pursuits. AI cannot produce novel thought.  

3. While many AI technologies are described as “generative,” current iterations are not sentient or self-aware.   

The current conversation about AI is muddied by occasional claims of sentience, which make for surprising and enticing headlines. In the summer of 2022, Google Engineer Blake Lemoine made the news when he claimed that Google’s AI-driven chatbot , LaMDA, was alive.  

Then, in the spring of 2023, New York Times technology writer Kevin Roose published a column entitled “A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled” alongside a transcript of his chat with Bing’s Chat GPT4-powered search engine.  

Most technologists working in the AI space are quick to point out that enormous datasets and advances in artificial neural networks (ANNs), which are inspired by the structure of the human brain, have honed the most advanced chatbots’ ability to mimic natural language.     In discussing AI technologies with students, instructors should take care to make this distinction clear, both so that the next buzzy headline doesn’t mislead them and so that the class has an opportunity to discuss the potential uses, advantages, and pitfalls of producing text that is virtually indistinguishable from organic human language.  

4. Most generative AI chat tools cannot access paywalled research.   

This limitation means that what any LLM-based AI tool can generate will not necessarily include the best, most recent, or most relevant peer-reviewed data in a given field. For research purposes, then, AI-generated text is particularly limited.  

While this may change over time, current chatbots are not well suited for creating reliable and legitimate university-level research. Instead, they tend to present general information culled from a massive dataset of popularly available information, like news articles, blog posts, and trade publications.  

Best Practices

Here’s our best advice for how to address the use (or prohibition) of AI technologies in the classroom:

1. Have frank discussions with students about the potential uses and limitations of AI technologies in the classroom and beyond. Guiding questions might include:  

• Under what circumstances might a student, instructor, researcher, journalist, public official, private citizen, employee, or public-sector worker helpfully leverage AI tools?  
• Under what circumstances would you consider the use of AI tools unfair, unethical, or careless?  
• Under what circumstances would the use of AI tools represent an abrogation of public trust (e.g. a politician using AI to craft an emotionally charged speech; a journalist using AI to write a news article; a thinktank using AI to craft draft legislation or a white paper)? 

2. Write and make available your classroom policy regarding the use of AI tools. For instance :

• Can a student in your course use AI to generate initial ideas to get started on an assignment?  
• Can students use AI to draft text for major assignments?   
• Can students use AI tools to help revise their own original draft text?  
• Can they use AI tools to find primary sources when doing research?  
• Can they use AI tools in a limited way (for example, to edit a specific word or phrase) as they would a thesaurus or dictionary or a citation-formatting tool?

3. If you have a prohibition on using AI-based technologies in the classroom, make your reasoning clear and provide alternative approaches.  

• Explain why you will not allow the use of AI tools in the classroom.  
• Discuss and have a written policy outlining the specific prohibitions on using AI technologies for the creation and completion of assignments.  
• In both the syllabus and on individual assignments, include a note about the prohibition of AI-based technologies in the creation and completion of assignments.  
• Engage in in-class pre-writing activities such as brainstorming, ideation, drafting, peer-review, and revision to support students in the writing process. 

4. If you allow students to use AI tools, experiment with them in the classroom space, and give students an opportunity to compare the structure, diction, and rhetorical features of human and AI-generated text.

• Look for structural deficiencies and proficiencies in the text: Is it legible? Is it specific? Is it informative or authoritative?  
• Look for tone and style: Does the text present information in a creative or engaging way? What, if any, textual flourishes are present in the work?   
• Note how the text uses information: Does it cite specific sources? Does it generalize or paraphrase information? What authority does the text appeal to, if any? Does the text employ verifiable information or facts in a credible manner?  
• Give students a short, low-stakes writing assignment (a 250-word reflection on their day, for instance) and have them complete it in class. Then have them prompt an AI chat tool to write a reflection for them. Compare the texts, looking for the differences between them, and noting any correlations.  

5. Reinforce that these tools are evolving, and that your course policies and broader university, governmental, and corporate policies regarding the use of AI tools will necessarily change over time, too.

This includes the information and suggestions provided in this toolkit.  

View sample AI activities and policies from musicology in the Model Library.

Cited and Recommended Sources

• Chiang, Ted. “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web.” The New Yorker Magazine, 9 Feb. 2023,   https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web
• Chui, Michael. “Forward Thinking on the Brave New World of Generative AI with Ethan Mollick.” McKinsey & Company , 31 May 2023, www.mckinsey.com/mgi/forward-thinking/forward-thinking-on-the-brave-new-world-of-generative-ai-with-ethan-mollick . 
• Crompton, Helen, and Diane Burke. “Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education: The State of the  Field.”  International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education , vol. 20, no.  1, Apr. 2023, pp. 1–22.  EBSCOhost , https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-023-00392-8 . 
• “Hard Fork: GPT-4 Is Here, and the Silicon Valley Bank Fallout.”  The New York Times , 17 Mar. 2023,  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/17/podcasts/hard-fork-gpt-4.html . 
• “Hard Fork: AI Extinction Risk and Nvidia’s Trillion-Dollar Valuation.”  The New York Times , 2 June 2023,  www.nytimes.com/2023/06/02/podcasts/hard-fork-chatgpt-nvidia.html . 
• How Will Artificial Intelligence Change Higher Ed? – The Chronicle of Higher Education , 25 May, 2023,  www.chronicle.com/article/how-will-artificial-intelligence-change-higher-ed . 
• Huang, Kalley. “Alarmed by A.I. Chatbots, Universities Start Revamping How They Teach.”  The New York Times , 16 Jan. 2023,  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/16/technology/chatgpt-artificial-intelligence-universities.html . 
• Metz, Cade. “Meet GPT-3. It Has Learned to Code (and Blog and Argue).”  The New York Times ,  24 Nov. 2020,  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/science/artificial-intelligence-ai-gpt3.html .  
• McMurtrie, Beth. “How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Teaching.” The Chronicle of Higher Education , 12 Aug. 2018, https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-artificial-intelligence-is-changing-teaching . 
• MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI. 1 Jul, 2023,  https://hcommons.org/app/uploads/sites/1003160/2023/07/MLA-CCCC-Joint-Task-Force-on-Writing-and-AI-Working-Paper-1.pdf.
• Mollick, Ethan. “ChatGPT Is a Tipping Point for AI.” The Harvard Business Review, 14 Dec. 2022, https://hbr.org/2022/12/chatgpt-is-a-tipping-point-for-ai . 
• Perkins, Mike. “Academic Integrity Considerations of AI Large Language Models in the Post-Pandemic Era: ChatGPT and Beyond.”  Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice , vol. 20, no. 2, Mar. 2023, pp. 1–24.  EBSCOhost , https://doi.org/10.53761/1.20.02.07 . 
• Reiss, Michael J. “The Use of AI in Education: Practicalities and Ethical Considerations.”  London Review of Education , vol. 19, no. 1, Mar. 2021, pp. 1–14.  EBSCOhost , https://doi.org/10.14324/LRE.19.1.05 . 
• Roose, Kevin. “Don’t Ban ChatGPT in Schools. Teach With It.”  The New York Times , 13 Jan. 2023,  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/12/technology/chatgpt-schools-teachers.html . 
• Schatten, Jeff. “Will Artificial Intelligence Kill College Writing?” The Chronicle of Higher Education , 14 Sept. 2022,  https://www.chronicle.com/article/will-artificial-intelligence-kill-college-writing
• Wilhelm, Ian. “Nobody Wins in the Academic Integrity Arms Race.” The Chronicle of Higher Education , 12 Jun. 2023, https://www.chronicle.com/article/nobody-wins-in-an-academic-integrity-arms-race . 
• Wooldridge, Michael. “Artificial Intelligence Is a House Divided.” The Chronicle of Higher Education , 20 Jan. 2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/artificial-intelligence-is-a-house-divided . 

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Applying to College? Here’s How A.I. Tools Might Hurt, or Help.

ChatGPT might change the application essay forever.

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By Natasha Singer

I spent the last week talking with university officials, teachers and high school seniors about the dreaded college admissions essay.

I cover education technology at The Times. And I’ve been thinking a lot about how artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, which can manufacture school essays and other texts, might reshape the college application process.

I was particularly interested to learn whether admissions officials were rejiggering their essay questions — or even reconsidering personal essays altogether.

Amid a deluge of high school transcripts and teacher recommendations, admissions officers often use students’ writing samples to identify applicants with unique voices, experiences, ideas and potential. How might that change now that many students are using A.I. chatbots to brainstorm topics, generate rough drafts and hone their essays?

To find out, I contacted admissions officials at more than a dozen large state universities, Ivy League schools and small private colleges, including Juan Espinoza , the director of undergraduate admissions at Virginia Tech.

Right now, he told me, many universities are still trying to figure out how the A.I. technologies work and what they mean for the admissions process.

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A complete guide to using AI for academic writing

• by Ilya Shabanov
• February 2, 2024 February 2, 2024
• Academic Writing , AI

ChatGPT has become incredibly versatile for academic writing. It can help you improve your academic writing (while teaching you how), find (real) citations to prove a point, or analyze papers for relevant statements and examples. In this workflow, we will look at three different AI assistants that will get you from a very rough outline to a polished article.

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But first, a disclaimer: AI will not write the paper for you . Academic writing is very niche, especially if you are writing on a grad/postgrad level, and AI is not good enough for this. At its core, a large language model, like ChatGPT, operates by predicting the most probable next word given a prompt. The result, therefore, is quite often predictable. It excels in extracting information from massive texts, paraphrasing, and finding patterns in language. This is what we are going to use to our advantage!

The general AI writing workflow is as follows:

• Start with an outline generated from your notes.
• Use Consensus GPT to find citations as evidence for single statements.
• Use Ai PDF GPT to extract concise statements from these PDFs that we can use as building blocks
• Build a writing assistant to help assemble loose sentences into paragraphs, paraphrase stubborn sentences and analyze finished writing.
• Iterate this loop until your writing is polished and clean
• We will use Litmaps to go even deeper into the literature review process by mixing papers from multiple domains.

If GPTs are new to you, check out my tutorial on creating customGPTs or go all the way down the rabbit hole by joining my course on GPTs :

Achieve 10x efficiency in research, learning, and everyday tasks with ChatGPT bots. This course takes you from knowing nothing to using the most cutting-edge techniques most people don’t know about in just a few hours.

Let’s get started!

1. Starting your paper

Let’s assume you understand the subject matter and know roughly what you want to write about. If not, go back to reading and note-taking. This is the foundation of your writing process. Start by simply outlining what you want to say in a simple sentence. This can look like this:

This outline is about 300 words and was later expanded to > 3000 words using the workflow you are about to learn. However, this first step is critical, and you will need good notes. To write a good paper or thesis, you must have a solid understanding of your field. AI can’t do it for you. Start learning note-taking in this free 8-day course or the in-depth note-taking course .

If you have too few bullet points you can expand them using plain ChatGPT ( see this tutorial ). The results are not groundbreaking, but they can help you to think of different aspects of your topic, especially as a novice.

2. ConsensusGPT finds evidence for your statements

Next, we need to find evidence (i.e., papers) that support or reject this point of view. If you already have quite a few in your note collection, you may skip this step entirely or use it as a “backup.” This popular AI assistant is built by Consensus , a tool that helps you discover scientific literature. Allegedly, it has access to over 200 million papers. No single database has all the papers, so be aware of the main limitation of AI: Answers may be incomplete.

Head over to ChatGPT and start a conversation with this assistant. Here is the direct link . You will need a premium subscription to ChatGPT to use this (and all other workflow steps). It is worth it, in my opinion, as ChatGPT is the most versatile tool for academics, and there are countless use cases in your day-to-day work.

Use this straightforward prompt: Find papers that show that [Whatever you are looking for]

Download the papers that you think are relevant to you. Generally, most suggestions will not be valuable, but almost always, there will be one spot-on suggestion. This is what we are looking for. Repeat this process with different prompts to get different results and collect what works.

3. Skim the papers and download what is relevant

Next, we are going to download these papers. In an ideal world, you will read what you find, likely leading to slow writing progress. So, instead, let’s prioritize and automate. Read the abstract and conclusion first. Let’s upload the PDF to MyAIDrive if the paper still feels relevant. We will need this platform to quickly extract information from the PDF with a different AI assistant.

After you upload the PDF and copy the link, head back to ChatGPT and start a conversation with AI PDF GPT . The paper you uploaded might “explore trait-based ecology” (very broad), but what I am looking for are methodological problems (since this is what I am writing about). It might be mentioned only in a few paragraphs. This is where AiPDF can save you massive amounts of time. It will find what you want and give you the section or page number. Now, you can read selectively and decide how and whether you will cite this paper in your work.

Rename the chats to the name of the paper. This helps you to later find this chat and keep the conversation about this paper going.

Some more examples of useful prompts to use with AI PDF:

• Explain how X influences Y according to this paper.
• Extract the key problems and challenges with approach X from this paper
• In which section does this paper speak about X
• Critically state why approach X works or doesn't work, short pro's and con's .
• Find evidence for X in paper
• On a scale of 1-10 how relevant is this paper to ...

I generally use AiPDF to extract information, find relevant viewpoints, and not just summarize it. This helps to form an argument because the extracted data is tied to the argument I am writing about . A summary, on the other hand, is free of context and does not help you as much.

4. Use Litmaps to find more relevant papers

Consensus errs on the side of finding too few papers, in my experience. A better way, therefore, is to use Litmaps . I use this especially when I am trying to bridge two domains. For example, there is a significant body of literature on how plants shift their ranges in climate change and another on predicting where plant species will grow given their traits and the climate. Combining them would yield papers on “predicting ranges from traits and climate.” Google doesn’t find much. However, Litmaps helps me discover these papers swiftly. 

Create an account and add articles by their DOI or title (or export from Zotero). Then click on “Related Articles” to start a search.

This works because Litmaps uses the citation network . So if I add papers on two topics, A and B, into my collection and find related articles, Litmaps will look for papers citing both issues. These will be precisely the papers on the synthesis of A and B, we are looking for. I cover Litmaps as part of my Effortless AI Literature Review course . It is one of my favorite tools for a literature review.

5. Improving your writing with a custom GPT assistant

Now that you have found all the evidence to write the perfect paragraph, you will need to write it. This can be difficult. The easiest way to start is to write a few loose, poorly formulated sentences with citations (from the previous steps) and merge them into a first draft using AI. However, there will be better writing.

Instead, google what good academic writing is and use this information to teach a ChatGPT AI assistant a set of rules for academic writing. You can even add some of your own or your journal’s requirements. Check out this tutorial on building AI assistants , or dive deep into my Effortless AI course if this is your first time building AI assistants. Here are the instructions for “WritingWanda,” my AI assistant:

A few tricks here make these instructions more efficient, like using Markdown and XML for formatting or starting with a role. Note that our bot will have three actions: Rephrase, Analyse, or Join. Initially, WritingWanda had only one task (join) and five rules. But as time goes by, you can keep adding and improving your bot until it matches what you want ideally.

Here is the bot in action. Notice how my sentences are initially loose and incoherent. The AI joins it into an excellent first draft . Now, I can go on and start polishing this to my liking.

Once you have written a paragraph you can use AI to automatically improve your writing. Our use of XML tags and markdown leads to very clear and readable output.

Try out Writing Wanda on ChatGPT . There are no limits what you can build with this technology. The best thing about it, is that you can keep on adding features to your bot and make it more powerful and more personalized to your needs.

This writing process starts with a few notes and loose ideas you want to write about.

• We found evidence for your initial statements using ConsensusGPT
• Where we need to be more thorough, we used Litmaps to find better papers.
• Then we skimmed the papers and uploaded the relevant ones to MyAIDrive
• This allowed us to use AiPDF GPT to analyze these papers, looking for relevant passages and sections for our writing.
• Combining bits of information from various PDFs, we created a “raw” sentence collection.
• Using a writing assistant, Writing Wanda , we transformed sentences into coherent paragraphs.
• After polishing the paragraph manually, we used AI to analyze the result using standard academic writing rules.

The result is a workflow that allows you to write very fast, as you spend most of your time building a logical argument instead of looking for the right papers and juggling words into readable prose.

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.

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Students Using Ai to Write Essays? Here’s How to Manage the Use of Ai Among Students Effectively

Sylvia Nguyen

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into the realm of education invites rising concerns among educators about the issue of students using Ai to write essays, plagiarism and misuse of Ai in students’ school work. There is an increasing trend of students utilizing AI-powered tools to assist them in crafting essays and academic papers.

While this presents a host of benefits, such as improved writing efficiency and enhanced language skills, it also raises concerns about the ethical use of AI and the potential for academic dishonesty. Therefore, it is imperative for educators and institutions to develop effective strategies to manage the use of AI among students, ensuring its responsible implementation while nurturing their growth as independent thinkers and writers. Here we explore the tools and strategies to help educators manage usage of Ai among students more effectively. 

The Rising Issues Associated with Ai Usage Among Students Using AI

With the rapid increase of AI-powered solutions, our students are among the individuals most affected by this technology. While AI offers numerous benefits, it also presents three critical emerging issues that could spiral out of control if not addressed seriously.

1. Students Using Ai to Write Essays

Ever since ChatGPT came into existence, educators have been concerned about plagiarism. When used appropriately, AI can help students become more efficient in completing their assignments. It can even offer ideas and perspectives that they might not have thought of before saving them from the tedium of research and giving them time to think critically. However if students rely heavily on AI to do all the work for them, it undermines the integrity of the education system and leads to an increase in plagiarism and academic misconduct. This ultimately fostered intellectual complacency, and hampers students’ critical thinking and comprehension abilities.

2. Cheating

AI can also be misused to cheat during exams. And academic dishonesty, even before the advent of AI, has been a significant concern for educators. And the existence of AI has just made it worse.

To complicate the issue, existing AI detectors do not always go a perfect job in differentiating human content from Ai-generated content . So, this additional burden to prevent academic dishonesty with the use of AI tools has rested on our shoulders ever since. 

3. Misinformation

While AI chatbots like Bing AI and Google Bard have access to the internet and are able to provide users with up-to-date information, in the end of the day, AI is still not a validated source. This is because AI is trained using vast amount of data from the Internet and it is possible that some of these data do not come from validated and credible sources. And this is a worrying concern for educators because it will lead to misinformation and divert students from acquiring accurate knowledge and facts on a certain topic.

So, How Teachers Can Manage Ai Usage Among Students Effectively?

1. Don’t ban Ai, Instead Recommend Suitable Ai Tools to Students

Instead of banning Ai tools, teachers should provide students with recommendations and guidelines. This approach helps to foster a sense of encouragement among students, motivating them to adhere to the suggestions put forth by their teachers.

A remarkable example of implementing this approach is the recent case at the University of Sydney, where medical science students were assigned the task of requesting ChatGPT to write an essay for them. However, they were required to subsequently revise the essay, track their changes, and submit a final draft. This exercise went beyond mere information compilation and tested their capacity to exercise sound judgment as well.

We have researched almost all Ai tools suitable for educators and cherry-picked 5: 

• Duolingo : The language-learning app Duolingo offers classes in over 30 languages. It employs a combination of AI and linguistics to tailor lessons to each individual’s skill level and learning pace, providing a personalized learning experience.
• Pearson : As a global educational services provider headquartered in the UK, Pearson offers an extensive range of digital learning resources and embraces the latest technologies, including AI, to enhance the online learning process.
• Century Tech : Century Tech offers an AI-based solution that integrates student data with cognitive neuroscience to develop customized lesson plans tailored to individual students’ needs.
• Querium : A web-based education platform that delivers personalized study plans in the fields of science and mathematics, Querium ensures that students receive tailored guidance and support in these subjects.
• Edmentum : Serving as a premier online education provider for students in grades K-12, Edmentum offers products and services aimed at improving educational standards, enhancing student achievement, and increasing educator efficiency.

2. Best Ai Plagiarism Checkers for Teachers

At the current age and time, Ai plagiarism checkers may be teachers’ best companions in weeding out unoriginal and plagiarised student work. Here is a short list of 5 best Ai plagiarism checkers for teachers. We only picked the FREE ones 😉:

• Copyleaks : Copyleaks boasts a 99.12% accuracy in detecting AI-generated content. Copyleaks offers robust capabilities for identifying AI-generated text and also supports multiple languages. What’s best is that the tool also promises future compatibility with ChatGPT 4.
• GPTKit : Developed using a custom model trained on a dataset of over 1 million samples, the tool boasts an even higher accuracy of approximately 98% . This is amazing news for educators! GPTKit also generates comprehensive results and a report with information including the authenticity and reality rate of the content.
• GPTZero : GPTZero utilizes the same technology as ChatGPT but aims to identify AI-generated content. The tool is continuously being developed, and the team is currently working on a specialized solution for educators.
• AI Detector Pro : AI Detector Pro’s algorithm is trained on GPT-3, GPT-4, and Bard, allowing it to provide accurate and detailed report indicating the probability of content being AI-generated. The best part is, the tool also includes the source URL, allowing educators to identify the plagiarised source effortlessly.
• Winston AI : Winston AI is a AI content detection solution tailored for publishing and education. It claims that its algorithm provides far better results in avoiding false positives than Turnitin with its training model using large datasets and large language models.

We have tested and compiled a list of the best free AI detectors for teachers here .

With these plagiarism checkers, the issue of students using Ai to write essays can be better controlled. 

3. Establish Guidelines

On top of that, to guide students in the proper and ethical use of AI tools, it is essential to educate them that these tools are meant to support not replace their learning. It is crucial to emphasize that AI should not serve as the primary source or sole contributor to their work and studies. Instead, students should produce their work independently, while utilizing AI tools as supplementary resources for support and assistance.

Furthermore, teachers should also provide guidelines on the topics of plagiarism and misconduct, including the potential consequences associated with the misuse of AI in school work.

4. Prioritize Fact Check in Class

Similar to a reporter fact-checking before broadcasting news, learning also requires fact-checking to prevent students copying Ai-generated content without processing the information. For students, independently verifying information can be challenging without proper guidance. As educators, it is our responsibility to teach students how to scrutinize the accuracy and validity of the knowledge they come across on random websites.

The most effective method for fact-checking is to verify if the information has been reported in scholarly articles or statistical reports published by reputable data enterprises. In cases where students cannot locate relevant academic articles, teachers can recommend alternative sources such as reputable online publishers or newspapers to cross-verify the information. If the information appears consistently across various trusted online sources and newspapers, there is a higher likelihood that it has undergone rigorous verification.

5. Consider Adjusting Exam Methods

To deter improper usage and academic dishonesty, consider making adjustments to the structures of summative and final exams.

For instance:

• Reintroduce traditional pen and paper for essay writing or test completion, reducing the reliance on AI-generated content.
• Increase the number of in-person assessments and essays, minimizing the opportunity for students to use AI tools at home.
• Utilize audio response questions instead of written ones, encouraging students to express their understanding and thoughts verbally rather than relying on AI-generated text.

By implementing these measures at the right time and occasions, you can create a learning environment that discourages improper usage of AI and promotes academic integrity among students.

Final Thoughts

Artificial intelligence is advancing at a rapid pace, especially in the realm of education. As this technology continues to evolve, it is expected that more EdTech providers will develop technological solutions to tackle the rising challenges associated with the usage of Ai in education, including the common problem of students using ai to write essays. While we anticipate the emergence of these solutions, let us proactively prepare our students to embrace and adapt to AI, the technology that holds the key to our future. By empowering them with the knowledge and skills needed to navigate and leverage AI effectively, we can ensure that our students are well-equipped for the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

For the latest tips, trends and tools about AI in education, read our  A-Z guide to AI in education !

Further Readings:

9 Best Free AI Detectors for Teachers in 2023 (Recommended by Teachers & Professionals)

How Ai is used in Education & 10 Ways You Can Too

The Pros and Cons of AI in Education and How it Will Impact Teachers in 2023

The Role of AI in Higher Education: How AI is Reshaping the Future of Learning

How to use ChatGPT like a Pro: 100+ ChatGPT Examples for Teachers (With Prompts You Can Copy)

About Sylvia Nguyen

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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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• I ‘m learning about [ insert topic here ]. Convert the key lessons from this topic into engaging stories and metaphors to aid my memorization.

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How to Use AI/ChatGPT Effectively for Your College Application Essays

Last updated November 16, 2023

A vital component of your college applications is your personal statement essay(s). With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT, you may be curious about how they can support your college application essay writing, or if it’s even okay to use them at all. We’ll share what you need to know about tools like ChatGPT and the do’s and don’ts of using AI in your college application essays.

What is AI? What is ChatGPT?

Artificial Intelligence (also known as AI), is technology designed to imitate human intelligence. Some examples of this include asking Siri about the weather on your iPhone, using Amazon’s Alexa to set an alarm, or receiving song suggestions based on the music you listen to on Spotify.

ChatGPT is a type of AI model that virtually chats with users to answer their questions and respond to their prompts. ChatGPT uses decades worth of internet data to learn how people communicate, solve problems, and find patterns. It then uses this data to create a human-like response when you interact with it. The more people use ChatGPT, the more information it gathers and learns. 

AI and ChatGPT are relatively new, so not many people understand the full extent of its consequences. However, it’s clear that these technologies are here to stay, so it’s important to understand how to use them responsibly. 

Can I use AI tools like ChatGPT to write my college application essay?

With AI technologies increasing in popularity, many concerns have been raised about using it responsibly. Some school districts– in Seattle, WA for example – have banned the use of ChatGPT due to issues of plagiarism and cheating. Chances are, your school or district might be working on or already have policies on the use of ChatGPT.

A few colleges have also established their own policies on AI. Some may have strict policies on plagiarism and discourage the use of ChatGPT, while others may have guidelines on how to use it responsibly and ethically. For example, while Georgia Tech doesn’t completely ban the use of ChatGPT, their statement suggests best practices when using AI for college applications. We highly recommend that you check a college’s policies or guidelines if you’re considering using AI tools on your applications to that school.

When in doubt, it’s probably best to avoid using ChatGPT to help you write your college application essay. But if you are thinking about using it, we recommend following these dos and don’ts:

Using AI for your College Application - Dos and Don'ts

Don’t use chatgpt to write your entire essay.

We can’t emphasize this enough– do not use ChatGPT to write your entire college application essay. Since ChatGPT learns from information submitted by humans, it can create generalizations, resulting in responses that sound unoriginal and robotic.

While it’s possible that ChatGPT can draft an entire essay in seconds, it’s not recommended to use as your final draft. The essay might be too general and lacking personality, therefore not allowing the reader to really get to know you. College admissions officers are experienced in reading hundreds, if not thousands, of essays, so it’s likely they can tell whether something was written by an AI or by a human. 

ChatGPT can be helpful in creating an outline, or maybe even creating a first draft. However, you will need to put in the work to edit it and ensure it captures your authentic voice and unique perspective– especially when applying to colleges that are highly competitive. Having trouble writing your college application essay? Check out our guide to get started .

DO use ChatGPT to generate ideas

Your college application essay should reveal something about you through storytelling. If you’re having trouble deciding what to write , you might turn to ChatGPT to help you generate ideas and narrow down your topic. For example, you can ask it to come up with 10 questions to help you brainstorm topics, or you can ask it to elaborate on an idea you might already have. However, ChatGPT can only provide general responses and is unable to provide a unique perspective, so you’ll still need to find ways to make your topic significant to you.

AI is not built to have meaningful conversations, and it’s impossible to share your full history and important memories for an AI model to learn. Programs like ChatGPT can’t accurately create an entire picture of you, so they’re unable to connect your life experiences to your values and what’s important to you. For example, you may have memories of taking care of your pet and how it taught you about loyalty; or you might enjoy a specific candy because it reminds you of the importance of friendship. You know yourself the best, so while ChatGPT can help start your idea, it’s up to you to finish it. 

DO use AI to proofread your essay

A benefit of using AI models is that they can check your essay for grammar errors and typos. Programs like Grammarly or ChatGPT can proofread your essay and provide suggestions on how to improve your spelling or the structure or clarity of your writing. In addition, when used correctly, you can use ChatGPT to find alternative ways to write something. For example, you can use it to help make your ideas more clear. If your sentence doesn’t sound right, ChatGPT can help rewrite it. If you’re stuck on a word, you can ask ChatGPT for suggestions.

Using Grammarly or ChatGPT to fix grammatical errors is a great way to enhance your writing, but it shouldn’t be the only resource you depend on. Have someone else proofread your essay, like a trusted friend, educator, parent, or guardian. You can also submit your essay to us, and one of our expert Get Schooled advisors will review it for free!

DON’T share any personal or sensitive information with AI Models

Since AI uses data submitted by humans to improve its models, it’s likely these programs will save any data you share, including your personal information. ChatGPT, for example, automatically saves all of the prompts and questions people submit, regardless of what’s being discussed. Moreover, while ChatGPT is an AI model, it is still created and run by humans, so all past conversations and questions may be seen by other people working for ChatGPT. 

It’s important to be careful when it comes to sharing your personal information, like your location, school, or any information about yourself that you wouldn’t want to share publicly. While ChatGPT recently allowed users to turn off chat history , it’s best to proceed with caution when using it. Additionally, using ChatGPT and other AI models require you to sign up for an account using your email address, phone number, and other identifying information, which can raise concerns around data security.

DO keep your authentic voice

Showing your personality through your essay is crucial to leaving a lasting impression on admissions officers. Because ChatGPT provides widely generic responses, it can create a story that may feel similar to something you experienced, but it will never be your authentic story.

A significant portion of your college application relies on data, like your GPA and test scores. Your personal statement essay is your opportunity to provide admissions officers a peek into your life, what your personality is like, what motivates you, and what your aspirations are. Colleges value authenticity, and your personal statement now plays an even more pivotal role after the U.S. Supreme court decision to reverse affirmative action . When writing about your perspectives related to diversity and inclusion, it’s important to share your experiences genuinely.

Instead of depending on ChatGPT to create a story for you, draw from your own personal experiences that you are excited to write about. Examples can be a relationship that impacted you the most, or an event that challenged your perspective. 

DON’T use AI as your only tool for college applications

Using ChatGPT can be a helpful tool in crafting your college application essay, but it shouldn’t be your only tool. There are other strategies that you can learn and various resources you can take advantage of. For example, check out our resources on how to write your college and scholarship application essays . When you complete your first draft, you can submit your essay to us for free review !

AI can be a great tool to help with your essay writing, but it isn’t a shortcut and should not be the only thing you depend on. At the end of the day, nobody knows you better than yourself!

Have any questions about the college application process? Text us! Send  #Hello to 33-55-77 to chat with one of our advisors, or, click here to have the text message set up for you !

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AI for Essay Writing — Exploring Top 10 Essay Writers

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Let’s admit it — essay writing is quite a challenging task for students. Especially with the stringent deadlines, conducting research, writing , editing, and addressing to-and-fro reviews — consumes a whole lot of time and often becomes stressful. Therefore, students are always on the lookout for tools that speed up the essay writing process.

And that’s when AI writing tools make their debut! Using the best AI for essay writing makes the lives of students much easier by automatically generating the essay for them.

The rise in the popularity of artificial intelligence technology and deep learning has paved the way for the numerous AI writer tools available today. To help you understand the different types of AI tools and their benefits, we’ve uncovered the features of the top 10 AI essay generators in this article.

Let’s explore the tools and learn how they are transforming the tedious task of essay writing!

What is essay writing?

Essay writing is a part of academic writing that emphasizes formulating an idea or argument. The main objective of academic essay writing is to present a well-reasoned argument or idea. Evidence, analysis, and interpretation are the three major components of essay writing . It should have a logical structure to support the argument or idea of the essay so that it communicates clearly and concisely.

What is an AI essay writer?

AI essay writers is a tool that is designed to help students generate essays using machine learning techniques. They can be used to generate a full essay or generate a few parts of the essay, for example, essay titles, introduction, conclusion, etc.

Why should researchers use AI essay generators?

There are infinite benefits to using AI tools for writing unique essays, especially for researchers or students. Here are a few of them —

1. Saves time

Using best AI for essay writing has its own benefits. Students can take care of the research process while these AI tools write the essays for them. Be it an essay topic or a full-length essay generation, it saves a bunch of students' time.

2. Boosts productivity

Writing is a tedious task especially when you want to write an essay about a novel topic, that writer’s block starts haunting and your productivity gets affected. But, with AI, it’s the other way around and increases productivity by quickly generating the essays for you.

3. Enhances writing skills — Vocabulary and Style

Adopting the best AI essay writing AI tool not only help with creating essays but also help us hone our writing skills by giving proper suggestions about grammar, sentence structure, tone, style, and word choice.

4. Reduces stress

Students often undergo a lot of pressure and stress because of deadlines and submissions. With the best AI essay generator, they help you write essays smarter thereby reducing stress and fear in no time.

5. Facilitates multidisciplinary research

AI essay writing tools foster interdisciplinary study through their ability to scan and combine knowledge from multiple domains. That way, it helps us quickly get a grasp of new subjects or topics without a heavy-lifting process.

6. Cost-effective

Most of the AI essay writing tools have lower pricing and also allow certain discounts for students. So, it is also a cost-effective approach to use AI writing tools.

The Top AI Essay Writing Tools and Their Features

Several AI essay writers are available based on the types of essays one would want to generate. Now, let's quickly understand the top 10 AI writing tools that generate essays within just a few minutes.

1. PerfectEssayWriter.ai

It is one of the best AI for essay writing that not only creates an essay but also comes up with advanced features including plagiarism detection, auto-referencing, and contextual analysis. As a result, it generates coherent essays that are well-researched and properly cited. It is best recommended for creating academic essays and essay outlines.

How does PerfectEssayWriter work?

• Pick the right tool for your purpose — Go with an essay writer if you want to generate a full essay or choose the essay outliner if you want to create just the outline of the essay.
• Enter your specific conditions and preferences. Add essay topic, academic level, essay type, number of pages, and special instructions, if any.
• Click on “generate” and wait for the result
• Once you have the essay generated, you can review, edit, or refine it and then download it.
• Generates a large chunk of data up to 2000 words
• Output is provided within 90 seconds
• Provides a plethora of other tools like Citation generator, grammar checker, thesis statement generator, and more
• Comes with 10+ essay writing templates
• Subscription-based and not a free tool
• Human review is a mandate

2. Essaybot - Personalized AI writing

Essaybot is the product of a reputed online essay-writing service, MyPerfectWords. It is meant to enhance academic essay writing and streamline the tasks of students. Its user friendly website makes it an instant and hassle-free essay generation saving a lot of time and effort for students.

How does Essaybot work?

• Enter the essay title or topic
• Click on “start writing” and wait for it to generate a well-reasoned essay.
• The tools come for free
• No sign-up is required
• 100% unique and High-quality output
• Very limited features that lack advanced functionalities

3. FreeEssayWriter.net

FreeEssayWriter is an organization that provides essay-writing services to students worldwide. It has an AI essay typer tool — that helps you generate essays instantly. What sets this essay typer apart is its initiative to help students with their free essay writer providing the students with a 2-page free essay.

How does FreeEssayWriter.net work?

It works similarly to Essaybot, input the title or the topic of your essay and wait for it to generate the essay. They also have an option to edit and download a free version of the generated essay instantly.

• Provides high-quality essays and is considered to be one of the reliable and trusted sources of information
• Students can improve their writing skills and learn more about essays by referring to their free essay database or sources
• Priority customer support is available 24*7
• The site is not optimized for mobile devices
• The quality of the essay output could still be improved

4. MyEssayWriter

This AI essay writing tool is no exception in terms of generating a high-quality essay. You can generate essays for various topics depending on the background of your research study. Be it academic or non-academic essay writing, this tool comes in handy.

How does MyEssay Writer work?

Add your preferences and then click on generate. It will give you a high-quality and 100% unique essay crafted based on your requirements.

• The tool comes for free — no subscription is required
• Knows for its consistency in the quality and the tone of the essay output
• Also has a paid custom writing service that provides human-written essays
• Might not provide quality output for complex and technical-based keywords or topic

5. College Essay AI

College essay AI stands unique as an ai writing tool as it not only uses an AI-based algorithm to generate essays but it also backs up the output as it is reviewed and approved by a team of professional experts. It is the best AI essay writing tool for college and graduate students where the output adheres to the graduate students' essay writing guidelines.

How does the College Essay AI generator work?

• Input the required information — essay topic, academic level, number of pages, sources, and specific instructions, if any.
• Click on “generate essay” and wait for the output
• Conduct plagiarism and grammar check
• Download the essay
• High-level output for academic essay writing
• Pocket-friendly premium plans
• Doesn’t provide multiple sets of templates
• Not quite suitable for non-academic essay writing

6. Jasper AI

Jasper AI has been the oldest player in the game of AI content writing. Fast forward to now, its features have been magnified with the inception of natural language processing algorithms and that’s how they are helping students write their essays as well. However, Jasper is the best AI tool for non-academic writing projects like content writing or creative writing.

How does Jasper AI work?

• Choose a template — if you are about to write an essay, go with the “document”
• Add your preferences
• Click “compose” and get the output
• Generates the essays instantly
• Provides well-structured output according to the tone and style of your preferences
• Not quite suitable for academic writing essays

7. Textero AI

Textero AI provides a few writing tools for students that facilitate their various academic papers and writing projects. Its essay generator helps you generate ideas for a full-length essay based on the topic and also suggests new topic ideas or thesis statement ideas for your academic assignments.

How does Textero AI work?

• Click on “Essay Generator” located on the LHS (Left-hand Side)
• Input the title and description based on which you want to generate the essay
• Pick the right citation style
• Click “generate” and wait for the output
• It also provides other tools like an outline generator, and summary generator and has an AI research assistant that answers all your questions relevant to the research
• The output is 100% unique and plagiarism and error-free
• Might fail to provide an essay focussed on complex or technical topics

8. Quillbot

Though Quillbot is essentially built for paraphrasing and summarizing tasks. It comes as a rescue when you have to revamp, improvise, or refine your already-composed essay. Its co-writer helps you transform your thoughts and ideas and make them more coherent by rephrasing them. You can easily customize your text based on the customization options available.

How does Quillbot Paraphraser work?

• Import or copy the content
• Click on “Paraphrase” “Summarize” or “Suggest text” based on your requirement
• Make the required customizations and save the document.
• Offers a plethora of tools required for students
• Both free and premium plans are available
• Enhances vocabulary and language skills
• Limited customization options with the free plan
• Only supports the English language

9. SciSpace Paraphraser

SciSpace is the best AI tool that helps you fine-tune your essay. If you feel your essay writing needs AI suggestions to improve the language, vocabulary, writing styles, and tone of your essay, SciSpace is at your rescue. It has more customized options than Quillbot and improves your essay by rephrasing it according to the required or preferred writing style, and tone. This is a very good alternative to Quillbot.

How does SciSpace Paraphrasing work?

• Simply paste the content to the screen
• Choose the length and variation properly
• Select the language
• Click “Paraphrase”
• Has 22 custom tones and all of them are available even on the free plan
• Supports 75+ languages
• Comes with an AI-detection report for English paraphrase output
• Delay in the output

10. ChatGPT

It would be unfair if we talk about AI tools and do not enlist ChatGPT. When it comes to automated essay writing tasks, ChatGPT is not trivial. With proper prompts, you can automate the essay writing process and generate a well-crafted and coherent essay. However, the quality and the accuracy cannot be trusted as the model hallucinates and doesn’t include sources.

How does ChatGPT work?

• Create a prompt based on your requirement
• Ask ChatGPT to write an essay about your topic, specify conditions and preferences
• Click enter and wait for the essay
• Comes for free
• Cannot rely on the output as the model hallucinates
• Lacks the upgraded features that other essay-writing tools have

Concluding!

Writing essays can be a real struggle. But, the inception of the best AI essay-generation tools makes the entire writing process a lot easier and smoother. However, you should be extra vigilant while relying on these tools and consciously use them only as a technological aid. Because over-reliance on these AI tools could diminish student's writing skills and the user can become more gripped by the tools. So, use it wisely without affecting your knowledge and skills.

You can explore the above tools whenever you need any help with essay writing, and reap the benefits of them without compromising on the quality of your writing.

And! If you're stuck exploring multiple research papers or want to conduct a comprehensive literature review , you know which tool to use? Yes, it's SciSpace Literature Review, our AI-powered workspace, which is meant to make your research workflow easier. Plus, it also comes with SciSpace Copilot , our AI research assistant that answers any question that you may have about the research paper.

If you haven't used it yet, you can use it here !

Choosing the best AI for writing long-form essays depends on your requirements. Here are the top 5 tools that help you create long-form and college essays —

1. Free Essay Writer AI

2. College Essay AI

3. My Essay Writer

4. Textero AI

5. Perfect Essay Writer

The Perfect Essay Writer AI and Textero AI are the two best AI essay generators that help you write the best essays.

ChatGPT is not specifically built to assist you with essay writing, however, you can use the tool to create college essays and long-form essays. It’s important to review, fact-check the essay, and refer to the sources properly.

Essaybot is a free AI essay generator tool that helps you create a well-reasoned essay with just a click.

Unless your university permits it, using AI essay generators or writing tools to write your essay can be considered as plagiarism.

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• Future Perfect
• There’s a fix for AI-generated essays. Why aren’t we using it?

ChatGPT didn’t write this and I can prove it.

by Kelsey Piper

It’s the start of the school year, and thus the start of a fresh round of discourse on generative AI’s new role in schools. In the space of about three years, essays have gone from a mainstay of classroom education everywhere to a much less useful tool, for one reason: ChatGPT. Estimates of how many students use ChatGPT for essays vary , but it’s commonplace enough to force teachers to adapt .

While generative AI has many limitations, student essays fall into the category of services that they’re very good at: There are lots of examples of essays on the assigned topics in their training data, there’s demand for an enormous volume of such essays, and the standards for prose quality and original research in student essays are not all that high.

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Right now, cheating on essays via the use of AI tools is hard to catch. A number of tools advertise they can verify that text is AI-generated, but they’re not very reliable . Since falsely accusing students of plagiarism is a big deal, these tools would have to be extremely accurate to work at all — and they simply aren’t.

AI fingerprinting with technology

But there is a technical solution here. Back in 2022, a team at OpenAI, led by quantum computing researcher Scott Aaronson , developed a “watermarking” solution that makes AI text virtually unmistakable — even if the end user changes a few words here and there or rearranges text. The solution is a bit technically complicated, but bear with me, because it’s also very interesting.

At its core, the way that AI text generation works is that the AI “guesses” a bunch of possible next tokens given what appears in a text so far. In order not to be overly predictable and produce the same repetitive output constantly, AI models don’t just guess the most probable token — instead, they include an element of randomization, favoring “more likely” completions but sometimes selecting a less likely one.

The watermarking works at this stage. Instead of having the AI generate the next token according to random selection, it has the AI use a nonrandom process: favoring next tokens that get a high score in an internal “scoring” function OpenAI invented. It might, for example, favor words with the letter V just slightly, so that text generated with this scoring rule will have 20 percent more Vs than normal human text (though the actual scoring functions are more complicated than this). Readers wouldn’t normally notice this — in fact, I edited this newsletter to increase the number of Vs in it, and I doubt this variation in my normal writing stood out.

Similarly, the watermarked text will not, at a glance, be different from normal AI output. But it would be straightforward for OpenAI, which knows the secret scoring rule, to evaluate whether a given body of text gets a much higher score on that hidden scoring rule than human-generated text ever would. If, for example, the scoring rule were my above example about the letter V, you could run this newsletter through a verification program and see that it has about 90 Vs in 1,200 words, more than you’d expect based on how often V is used in English. It’s a clever, technically sophisticated solution to a hard problem, and OpenAI has had a working prototype for two years .

So if we wanted to solve the problem of AI text masquerading as human-written text, it’s very much solvable. But OpenAI hasn’t released their watermarking system, nor has anyone else in the industry. Why not?

It’s all about competition

If OpenAI — and only OpenAI — released a watermarking system for ChatGPT, making it easy to tell when generative AI had produced a text, this wouldn’t affect student essay plagiarism in the slightest. Word would get out fast, and everyone would just switch over to one of the many AI options available today: Meta’s Llama, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini. Plagiarism would continue unabated, and OpenAI would lose a lot of its user base. So it’s not shocking that they would keep their watermarking system under wraps.

In a situation like this, it might seem appropriate for regulators to step in. If every generative AI system is required to have watermarking, then it’s not a competitive disadvantage. This is the logic behind a bill introduced this year in the California state Assembly, known as the California Digital Content Provenance Standards , which would require generative AI providers to make their AI-generated content detectable, along with requiring providers to label generative AI and remove deceptive content. OpenAI is in favor of the bill — not surprisingly, as they’re the only generative AI provider known to have a system that does this. Their rivals are mostly opposed.

I’m broadly in favor of some kind of watermarking requirements for generative AI content. AI can be incredibly useful , but its productive uses don’t require it to pretend to be human-created. And while I don’t think it’s the place of government to ban newspapers from replacing us journalists with AI, I certainly don’t want outlets to misinform readers about whether the content they’re reading was created by real humans .

Though I’d like some kind of watermarking obligation, I am not sure it’s possible to implement. The best of the “open” AI models that have been released (like the latest Llama), models that you can run yourself on your own computer, are very high quality — certainly good enough for student essays. They’re already out there, and there’s no way to go back and add watermarking to them because anyone can run the current versions, whatever updates are applied in future versions. (This is among the many ways I have complicated feelings about open models. They enable an enormous amount of creativity, research, and discovery — and they also make it impossible to do all kinds of common-sense anti-impersonation or anti-child sexual abuse material measures that we otherwise might really like to have.)

So even though watermarking is possible, I don’t think we can count on it, which means we’ll have to figure out how to address the ubiquity of easy, AI-generated content as a society. Teachers are already switching to in-class essay requirements and other approaches to cut down on student cheating. We’re likely to see a switch away from college admissions essays as well — and, honestly, it’ll be good riddance, as those were probably never a good way to select students .

But while I won’t mourn much over the college admissions essay, and while I think teachers are very much capable of finding better ways to assess students, I do notice some troubling trends in the whole saga. There was a simple way to let us harness the benefits of AI without obvious downsides like impersonation and plagiarism, yet AI development happened so fast that society more or less just let the opportunity pass us by. Individual labs could do it, but they won’t because it’d put them at a competitive disadvantage — and there isn’t likely to be a good way to make everyone do it.

In the school plagiarism debate, the stakes are low. But the same dynamic reflected in the AI watermarking debate — where commercial incentives stop companies from self-regulating and the pace of change stops external regulators from stepping in until it’s too late — seems likely to remain as the stakes get higher.

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Student Guide to AI

• What is AI?
• Can I Use AI in My Class?

Using AI: A Checklist

• Some Uses for AI Tools
• Concerns About AI
• NECC Academic Policies
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Much of the content of this research guide is based on and adapted from Elon University's AI-U: A Student Guide to Navigating College in the Artificial Intelligence Era  by Elon University CC-BY-NC .

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Best AI Tools For Essay Writing [Experts Choice]

• September 6, 2024 Updated

Choosing the best AI tools for essay writing  is essential for anyone crafting well-structured and compelling essays. These tools can significantly enhance your writing process, ensuring your ideas are communicated clearly and effectively.

Over the years, AI writing tools have evolved from basic grammar checkers to specialized platforms that offer content generation, language enhancement, and citation management. 

Incorporating the best AI writing tools into your workflow in 2024 can make a noticeable difference, whether you’re using free or paid options.

Best AI Tools For Essay Writing: Quick Comparison

Here, I will explore the best AI tools for essay writing to help you craft high-quality content efficiently. These tools offer various features that cater to different writing needs, from content generation to language refinement.

Below is a quick comparison of the best AI tools , highlighting their key features and pricing. Choosing the right tool can provide tailored benefits, whether you’re looking for free or premium options.

If you’re looking for the b est AI tools for essay writing free , consider exploring platforms like Rytr and Writer Hand that offer robust features without any cost.

Best AI Tools For Essay Writing: In-Depth Analysis

When it comes to essay writing, the right AI tools can significantly enhance the quality and efficiency of your work. Below is an in-depth look at the best AI tools for essay writing, each offering unique features tailored to different writing needs.

1. Copy AI – Best for Essay Writing

Copy AI is a robust tool designed to streamline the essay writing process. It’s particularly effective for generating content quickly, ensuring that your essays are well-structured and coherent.

The tool leverages advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to assist in crafting compelling essays, making it an excellent choice for students and professionals alike.

Thanks to its intuitive interface, using Copy AI is straightforward. Everything is designed to be user-friendly, from logging in to exploring its extensive features. This ease of use extends to its mobile compatibility , allowing you to write and edit essays using web, iOS, or Android platforms.

Additionally, Copy AI supports a variety of integrations, including Google Sheets, WordPress, and Zapier , which can further enhance your workflow by connecting with the tools you already use.

Despite its many strengths, Copy AI does have some limitations. For example, while it excels at generating content, it lacks an advanced plagiarism check feature, which can be a crucial tool for academic writing.

Moreover, the pricing can be considered high compared to other essay writing tools, especially if you need more than one seat or advanced features.

Copy AI also excels in maintaining data security with enterprise-grade security protocols . This ensures that your data is protected, especially important for professionals handling sensitive information.

Pros and Cons

• User-friendly interface that’s easy to navigate.
• Unlimited word count in paid plans.
• Mobile compatibility for writing on the go.
• Strong integration capabilities with other tools like Google Sheets and WordPress .
• No advanced plagiarism check is available.
• Higher pricing for premium features.
• Limited seat availability in lower-tier plans.

Customer Support and Refund Policy

Copy AI offers robust customer support that is available directly through its website. They provide a 100% money-back guarantee within five days if the service does not meet expectations. The Free Forever plan gives you access to basic features at no cost, making it easy to test the tool before committing to a paid plan.

Integrating  Copy AI into your essay writing process can significantly enhance your writing efficiency, ensuring your essays are high-quality and engaging. For more details, you can check my in-depth review of Copy AI .

2. Anyword – Best for Essay Writing and Content Analytics

Anyword is an advanced AI writing tool that excels in essay writing by providing data-driven content generation and optimization.

It uses a homegrown predictive performance model and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to help writers create compelling essays tailored to engage their audience.

The platform offers over 100+ templates , making it a versatile choice for students, educators, and professionals who must produce high-quality essays.

The tool ensures a smooth experience from logging in to customizing content with predictive performance scores. Its mobile compatibility allows you to work on essays from anywhere, using its Google Chrome extension to integrate seamlessly into your workflow.

Anyword scores high in content analytics and plagiarism checks , providing insights into how your essay might perform. However, it lacks brand voice customization .

The tool is particularly praised for its predictive insights and comprehensive grammar checks that help enhance essay quality.

• Predictive performance insights help optimize essay content.
• Unlimited word count allows for comprehensive writing.
• Strong grammar and plagiarism checks ensure essay quality.
• No refunds for canceled subscriptions.
• Higher pricing for more advanced features.
• No brand voice customization is available.

Anyword offers dedicated customer support via a customer success team , ensuring users maximize the tool’s capabilities.

They provide a 7-day free trial to explore all features. However, they have a strict no-refund policy for canceled subscriptions, which may not appeal to all users. For more details, you can check my Anyword review .

Integrating  Anyword into your essay writing process allows you to leverage AI-driven insights to craft engaging and academically robust essays.

3. ChatGPT – Best for Essay Writing and Content Summarization

ChatGPT , developed by OpenAI, is an exceptional AI tool for essay writing , offering powerful capabilities for generating, structuring, and refining content.

With its Large Language Models (LLMs) , ChatGPT can handle complex topics, provide detailed summaries, and assist with language translation, making it a top choice for students, researchers, and professionals who need to craft high-quality essays.

The platform is user-friendly and accessible via web, iOS, and Android , making it easy to draft essays or edit content from anywhere.

Its intuitive interface guides you through generating content and exploring advanced features, such as DALL·E for visual content and Advanced Data Analysis .

ChatGPT integrates seamlessly with Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Zapier , allowing for a smooth workflow and enhanced productivity.

It is highly rated for its content generation quality and multi-language support , but the basic plan lacks a built-in grammar check .

• High-quality essay generation using advanced language models.
• It supports multiple languages and integrates with various tools.
• Accessible on multiple platforms , including web, iOS, and Android.
• There needs to be a built-in grammar check in the free plan.
• No refund policy for subscriptions.
• Limited features in the free version.

ChatGPT offers customer support via live chat , ensuring users receive timely assistance when needed. However, it does not provide refunds, which can be a drawback for those seeking more flexible options.

The free plan lets users explore basic features, while paid plans provide access to GPT-4 and additional tools for more advanced essay-writing needs. For more details, please see my in-depth review of ChatGPT .

4. Rytr – Best for Essay Writing and Paraphrasing

Rytr is a versatile AI writing assistant who excels at essay writing. It offers robust features for generating well-structured content and paraphrasing existing text.

Powered by the GPT-3 language model , Rytr is ideal for students, educators, and professionals who must efficiently produce high-quality essays.

Its 40+ templates cater to various writing needs, making it easy to draft, refine, and enhance essays.

Rytr is highly user-friendly, with a straightforward interface that simplifies content creation when you log in.

The platform’s mobile compatibility allows users to write and edit essays on the go, providing flexibility and convenience.

Integrations with tools like Google Docs, Slack, and Asana further streamline the writing process, making it a valuable addition to any writing workflow.

Rytr is highly rated for its paraphrasing capabilities and ease of use but lacks multi-user support and has a strict refund policy .

However, its affordability, plagiarism check , and customizable outputs make it a solid choice for those focusing on essay writing and content refinement.

• Affordable pricing plans with unlimited word count options.
• Plagiarism check helps ensure originality in essays.
• Seamless integration with productivity tools like Google Docs and Slack .
• No multi-user support , limiting collaborative features.
• No built-in grammar check , which could be useful for essay writing.
• Strict refund policy , offering no refunds for canceled subscriptions.

Rytr offers customer support via email , ensuring users can reach out for help when needed. It provides a free plan with limited features, allowing users to explore its basic functionalities.

However, Rytr has a no-refund policy for canceled subscriptions, which could concern some users. For more insights, check my in-depth review of Rytr .

5. Writesonic – Best for Essay Writing and Content Creation

Writesonic is a versatile AI writing tool that excels in essay writing , offering features designed to streamline the writing process from brainstorming to final editing.

Powered by GPT-3 and GPT-4 language models , Writesonic helps writers generate high-quality essays, making it ideal for students, educators, and professionals.

The tool provides a variety of templates to cater to different writing styles and needs, enhancing the overall essay-writing experience.

Writesonic is user-friendly, with an intuitive interface that simplifies the writing process. From logging in to generating content, the platform ensures a seamless experience. Its mobile compatibility allows users to write, edit, and refine essays.

Writesonic integrates with various tools like Google Docs and Slack , enabling a smooth workflow for essay writing.

The tool is highly rated for its content quality and integration capabilities but lacks in areas such as brand voice customization and has a limited refund policy .

However, its ability to generate coherent and well-structured essays with minimal effort makes it a favorite among essay writers.

• High-quality essay generation with advanced AI models .
• Seamless integration with tools like Google Docs and Slack .
• Plagiarism and grammar checks to ensure essay quality.
• Brand voice customization is not available.
• Limited refund policy , only covering seven days .

Writesonic provides customer support via live chat and email , ensuring users get timely assistance. It offers a free trial with limited features, allowing users to explore the tool’s capabilities.

However, Writesonic has a limited refund policy , offering refunds only within seven days of subscription. For more insights, check out the Writesonic review.

Integrating Writesonic into your essay writing process can help you produce high-quality, well-structured essays with minimal effort, thanks to its advanced AI engines and diverse templates.

6. Jasper AI – Best for Essay Writing and Content Strategy

Jasper AI is a comprehensive AI-powered writing assistant that excels in essay writing and overall content creation.

Leveraging the capabilities of multiple AI models from Cohere, OpenAI, and Anthropic , Jasper AI is designed to deliver high-quality content for students, educators, and professionals who need structured and engaging essays.

The tool offers various features, such as plagiarism checking , style guides , and dynamic templates , making it a versatile choice for essay writing.

Jasper AI is incredibly user-friendly, featuring a clean interface that simplifies navigating through its various options.

The tool’s mobile compatibility ensures you can work on essays from any device, providing flexibility. Integrations with platforms such as Google Docs , Microsoft Word , and Zapier further streamline the writing process, allowing for seamless collaboration and project management.

Jasper AI is highly rated for its customizable workflows and advanced AI-assisted content generation . However, it lacks flexibility in its refund policy and may be considered expensive compared to other tools.

Nonetheless, its comprehensive suite of features for essay writing makes it a top choice for users seeking high-quality content.

• Advanced AI models provide high-quality essay content.
• Comprehensive plagiarism and grammar checks for accurate writing.
• Customizable workflows and integrations enhance user experience.
• Limited refund policy , only covering annual plans.
• You can’t cancel mid-year once a yearly plan is purchased.

Jasper AI offers 24/7 customer support via email and chat , ensuring users get timely help. It provides a 7-day free trial to test its features.

Annual plans have a  7-day cancellation and refund period , but subscriptions must be canceled promptly. For more details, check out my Jasper AI review .

Thanks to its advanced AI models and robust customization options, Incorporating Jasper AI into your essay writing routine can significantly enhance content quality.

7. Jenni AI – Best for Academic and Essay Writing

Jenni AI is a specialized AI writing assistant for academic and essay writing . It provides robust features such as AI autocomplete , in-text citations , and paraphrasing tools .

With its focus on helping users craft well-structured essays and research papers, Jenni AI is an excellent choice for students, researchers, and academics.

The platform has tools that facilitate multilingual support , outline building , and export options like LaTeX and Word, making it versatile for various academic needs.

Using Jenni AI is straightforward, with a user-friendly interface that guides you through the writing process from start to finish.

The tool is mobile-compatible , allowing users to write and edit essays. Unique features like bulk import sources via .bib and the ability to chat to your PDFs make Jenni AI highly effective for research-based essay writing.

The tool is highly rated for its academic writing capabilities and in-text citation features but lacks in areas like integrations and grammar checks . However, its affordability and specialized academic tools make it a strong choice for essay writing.

• In-text citations and paraphrasing tools are ideal for academic writing.
• Multilingual support enhances accessibility for non-native speakers.
• Mobile compatibility allows for flexible writing and editing.
• Limited integrations with other platforms.
• There is no grammar check feature, which could benefit essay writers.
• Essential customer support with limited options.

Jenni AI offers basic customer support via email , ensuring users can reach out with any issues. While there isn’t a specified refund policy , users can explore the tool’s features with its straightforward pricing plans. For more detailed insights, explore the Jenni AI review .

By incorporating Jenni AI into your essay writing workflow, you can benefit from AI-driven tools explicitly tailored for academic excellence and structured writing .

8. Moonbeam – Best for Essay Writing and Structured Long-Form Content

Moonbeam is an AI writing assistant designed to excel in essay writing and long-form content creation .

It benefits students, writers, and content creators looking to generate well-structured essays, research papers, and detailed assignments.

Moonbeam provides access to various templates that streamline the writing process, from drafting essays to creating comprehensive outlines.

Using Moonbeam is easy. The platform’s straightforward interface makes content creation intuitive. It also features mobile compatibility , allowing users to write and edit essays.

Moonbeam’s integration with ChatGPT enhances content generation capabilities, offering AI-driven support for drafting, summarizing, and refining text.

Moonbeam is highly rated for its long-form content generation and user-friendly design , but it lacks in areas such as brand voice customization and detailed language model options .

However, its flexible free plan and affordability make it an attractive option for those focused on essay writing.

• Access to all templates for diverse writing needs.
• Integration with ChatGPT for enhanced content generation.
• A generous free plan allows users to test the tool’s capabilities.
• Limited brand voice customization options.
• Lack of detailed language model specifications .
• No specified grammar check feature could  benefit essay writing.

Moonbeam provides customer support via email , ensuring that users can get assistance as needed. It offers a 100% money-back guarantee within 30 days , giving users confidence to try the tool without risk. For further details, explore the Moonbeam review .

Integrating Moonbeam into your essay writing process can significantly enhance your ability to create structured, well-researched essays with ease, thanks to its AI integration and intuitive platform.

9. Simplified – Best for AI Essay Writing and Content Rewriting

Simplified is a powerful AI-driven tool ideal for essay writing and content creation.

It offers features like an AI Essay Writer , AI Content Rewriter , and AI Docs , making it perfect for students, educators, and content creators who must draft high-quality essays and other written materials quickly and efficiently.

With over 80+ templates and support for 20+ languages , Simplified provides versatile solutions for diverse writing needs.

Navigating Simplified is straightforward due to its user-friendly interface . Everything is designed for ease of use, from logging in to exploring its features.

The tool also offers mobile compatibility , allowing users to write and edit essays anytime. Powered by GPT-3 and GPT-4 , it ensures high-quality, coherent content output that is suitable for academic and professional settings.

It is rated highly for its template variety and integration capabilities but lacks specific options like detailed language model controls and custom integration flexibility . However, its affordability and robust content generation options make it a reliable tool for essay writing.

If you’re searching for an essay builder free , Simplified offers a flexible plan with access to numerous templates and features to streamline your essay writing.

• Wide variety of templates for different content needs.
• Supports multiple languages for diverse writing requirements.
• A free plan is available with a cap on word count for testing features.
• Limited customization for brand voice.
• No detailed language model controls are available for more advanced users.
• Integration options are not clearly defined.

Simplified offers customer support via email , ensuring users can get help. The tool provides a free plan with a word generation cap, allowing users to try the platform risk-free.

The refund policy details aren’t specified, so it’s advisable to contact support for any refund-related inquiries. For more information, read my Simplified Review !

By incorporating Simplified into your essay writing toolkit, you can use its AI-powered writing capabilities to generate well-structured essays and academic content effortlessly.

10. WriterHand – Best for AI-Powered Essay and Content Generation

WriterHand is a 100% free AI writing tool specializing in essay writing and a wide range of content generation tasks, such as script writing , storytelling , and email writing .

This tool is ideal for users who need quick and efficient content creation without worrying about costs. Its various generators, including an  AI Essay Writer  and  Paragraph Generator , make it versatile for students, writers, and content creators.

Using WriterHand is effortless, with a clean interface that guides you through different content types.

While the platform does not have a mobile app, it is accessible via mobile browsers, allowing users to create and edit essays on the go.

Although it lacks advanced features like integration with third-party tools and customization options, it compensates with a simple, easy-to-use interface suitable for beginners.

WriterHand is highly rated for its cost-effectiveness and ease of use, but it lacks advanced AI features , plagiarism checks , and brand voice customization .

However, it offers valuable basic essay writing and content generation features as a free tool.

• It is completely free to use, making it highly accessible.
• Simple interface for fast essay writing and content generation.
• Supports various content types , from essays to poems and stories.
• Limited to 200-300 words per generation, it may require multiple sessions for longer texts.
• No advanced features like plagiarism checks or third-party integrations.
• Basic functionality with limited customization options.

WriterHand is free of cost, allowing users to access all its features without subscription or payment requirements. This makes it an excellent choice for individuals seeking a cost-effective solution for basic essay writing and content generation tasks.

WriterHand provides customer support via email , allowing users to get assistance if needed. Since the tool is entirely free, there is no refund policy. This makes it a straightforward and risk-free option for users looking for an essential AI tool for essay writing and content creation.

WriterHand is an excellent choice for those seeking a simple, cost-effective solution for writing essays and generating various content types.

How To Choose The Best AI Tools For Essay Writing?

Choosing the best AI tool for essay writing involves evaluating several vital factors that ensure high-quality and user-friendly content creation.

• Usability and Accessibility : I focused on tools with an intuitive interface and easy navigation, ensuring they work well on desktop and mobile devices, which is important for flexibility across different regions.
• Content Quality : The best tools provide grammar checks , plagiarism detection , and multiple language support to create high-quality essays that meet diverse regional needs.
• Pricing Flexibility : Tools offering free and paid options cater to different budgets and preferences, allowing users to choose features based on their needs.
• Data Security and Customer Support : I prioritized tools with robust data security and responsive customer support , essential for users in regions with strict privacy regulations.

Choosing the best AI for writing essays can significantly enhance productivity, especially with tools like ChatGPT and Jasper AI which offer advanced content generation features.

How AI Writing Tools Help Essay Writing?

AI writing tools leverage advanced technologies to streamline and enhance the essay writing process, making it faster, more accurate, and regionally adaptable.

• Efficiency through NLP : With Natural Language Processing (NLP) , AI writing tools generate well-structured content faster than traditional methods, reducing time spent on drafting and editing.
• Adaptability to Regional Needs : These tools can adapt to various writing styles and regional preferences, making producing essays that align with local expectations easier.
• Enhanced Features : AI tools provide content suggestions , style enhancements , and automatic citations , which streamline the essay writing process, particularly for academic writing.
• Collaborative Writing : Integration with popular platforms enables real-time feedback and collaboration, making writing more interactive and efficient.

Which AI is best at writing essays?

Is it ok to use ai to write essays, what is the ai everyone is using to write essays, is using ai for essays cheating, what is the best free ai for essay writing.

The b est AI tools for essay writing —such as Jasper AI , Rytr , and ChatGPT —offer a range of valuable features like content generation, grammar checks, and style guides, making them ideal for both students and professionals.

Whether you opt for free options like Writer Hand or premium tools like Jasper AI , integrating the b est AI tools for essay writing  into your workflow can be a game-changer, helping you produce compelling, well-structured essays effortlessly.

Digital marketing enthusiast by day, nature wanderer by dusk. Dave Andre blends two decades of AI and SaaS expertise into impactful strategies for SMEs. His weekends? Lost in books on tech trends and rejuvenating on scenic trails.

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LONDON, ENGLAND - FEBRUARY 03: In this photo illustration, the OpenAI "ChatGPT" AI-generated answer ... [+] to the question "What can AI offer to humanity?" is seen on a laptop screen on February 03, 2023 in London, England. OpenAI, whose online chatbot ChatGPT made waves when it was debuted in December, announced this week that a commercial version of the service, called ChatGPT Plus, would soon be available to users in the United States. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

The use of ChatGPT and other AI tools has added to the noise that surrounds the college application process every year. Analysts question whether the college essay will survive , if students will cheat , and how ChatGPT will impact educational equity . For the first two concerns, solutions discussed in the college admissions world include the use of proctored and handwritten essays, or sending in portfolio materials in lieu of essays. As I covered in a recent piece on Forbes , Common App delayed the release of its prompts, possibly due to ChatGPT concerns.

While ChatGPT has many questioning the role and usefulness of the college essay, there are ways to make the college admissions process more efficient and effective in the exploration and application phases.

Prepare For Campus Tours

When students go for campus tours, they are often unsure about which questions to ask. Before embarking on a long journey for a college visit, use artificial intelligence to help you to generate some questions. Here’s an example of how you would ask ChatGPT could help you prepare you for your tour:

Act as a prospective student visiting Vanderbilt University who's interested in engineering, debate team, and Asian-American life on campus. What are some questions to ask on a college tour when interacting with my tour guide?

The“Act as” feature in ChatGPT allows you to get a more personalized answer for your own needs and preferences while inserting personal details about your life and targeted characteristics.

However, ChatGPT did not generate my personal favorite human tour question: Can you tell me about 1-2 initiatives or academic programs that people on campus are talking a lot about these days? This question is gold because it helps students to get some clues about aspects of campus life to emphasize in college essays based on current trends.

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Best covid-19 travel insurance plans, create a college application timeline.

Many students and families struggle with managing all of the college application tasks associated with the college application process. AI can support you to stay organized and create deadlines for yourself. Here’s an example query where ChatGPT can help your calendar:

I am a prospective undergraduate student who needs help organizing my timeline and deadlines. Develop a comprehensive timeline for April 2023-December 2023 that includes essay writing, including my supplement essays, creating my resume and activity list, filling out application forms, filling in the FAFSA. I am applying to early decision and early action colleges that have deadlines in November as well as regular decision colleges which have deadlines in January. Give an answer in tabular format.

Here is ChatGPT’s (partial) response:

College admissions timeline by ChatGPT

The output of “tabular format” is super helpful for keeping dates and tasks organized and holding yourself accountable to complete application goals.

Research The Most Important Financial Aid Metric: Net Price Of Colleges

Net price is the important figure in evaluating college costs, not tuition and fees . It is equal to out-of-pocket expenses minus, grants, loans and education tax benefits. That is the term to use when you query ChatGPT, you want to ask about the net price for the colleges you’re interested in, rather than tuition and fees. You also want to get the links to each college’s net price calculator so that you can calculate your expected out-of-pocket expenses:

I am a prospective undergraduate student who's looking to know the net price I can expect to pay at certain institutions. Can you show me the average net price of these 5 institutions along with the weblinks to these institutions' net price calculators? New York University, University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University, Notre Dame, Rice University. Give an answer in tabular format.

Here's ChatGPT’s (partial) response:

Net Price List from ChatGPT

Now that you know about the net price query, you can begin to research the financial aspects of colleges in a more efficient way as well as easily find calculators for each school.

Create Your Personalized College List

As students and parents, you have many criteria for what you’re looking for in a college; including location, size, list of interested majors, and net price. Here’s what it might look like to query ChatGPT, according to your criteria:

I am seeking a list of colleges, including their websites, within 6-8 hours driving distance from Philadelphia, PA, with an average net price between $10,000-$20,000. These colleges should have an active fraternity scene, engineering programs and a flexible curriculum. Give the answer in tabular format.

While AI is not a substitute for college fairs , virtual college information sessions, and campus tours, it is a great tool for putting together an initial college list based upon your criteria and discovering new schools you may not have considered. After getting the initial list from ChatGPT, you can double-check the fit of these colleges by digging into their specific programs, resources and admissions information.

Discover Relevant Scholarships

While there are many websites to find scholarships, AI can create a list of opportunities for you based on your academic performance, identity groups, affiliations, and any other personal qualities. Note that the data on ChatGPT is only included until 2021, so you must include this year in your query to generate the most up-to-date response:

I am a prospective undergraduate student who's looking for scholarships. Some details about me are that I'm a neurodivergent woman with 1550 on my SAT and a 4.0 GPA. I am excellent at Lacrosse and debate and have received awards for both pursuits. Show me a list of available scholarships that I can apply for from 2021 including the award amounts and websites where I can learn more. Give an answer in tabular format.

Once you have the list of scholarships, you can then revert back to the timeline query I shared above and start organizing your scholarship deadlines.

One final point: If you like what you see on your ChatGPT lists, you can always follow up your query with another: “Can you add more to this list?” While using one AI tool alone cannot substitute in-depth research and human-to-human connection in your college search and discovery process, it gives you a way to kickstart and supercharge your college application process in a way that’s never before been possible.

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Free AI Tools for Academic Writing 2024

Can ChatGPT write an essay?

Can it write a vivid and authentic text full of witty thoughts?

Maybe in a couple of years…

Even though chatbots are good at drafting academic texts, they still lack critical thinking and humans’ unique style . Therefore, they can’t work as full-fledged writing services. We recommend trying other specialized tools rather than relying on chatbots to generate the whole text. Such online tools are tailored to a specific command, for example, creating a hook or generating solid arguments for an essay. Read this guide to discover our online and free instruments to help you write a memorable paper.

Disclaimer: We are strictly against presenting AI-generated texts as our own . All materials written by a language model should be quoted or used only for inspirational or brainstorming purposes. We are not responsible in any way if you are caught cheating using our AI tools.

• 📜 AI Tools for Writing Texts
• 🖊️ AI Tools for Various Essay Parts
• 💫 Tools to Improve Your Paper
• 🔎 Tools to Check Your Writing
• 🪶 Tools to Help with Literature
• 🎟️ Tips for Using AI Tools

🔗 References

📜 ai tools for writing essays, speeches, and other texts.

The following paragraphs will discuss tools that generate texts on any topic from scratch. Read on to learn more about each of them!

Persuasive Speech Generator

A Persuasive Speech Generator is a perfect choice to leave your audience with a lasting impression from your speech. The tool produces logical, well-ordered texts that influence listeners. It allows you to describe your primary goal and your target audience. While following your query details, the Persuasive Speech Generator also meets all academic requirements.

Informative Speech Maker

An Informative Speech Maker can be beneficial when you need a text to communicate specific information to the audience. This online tool employs a sophisticated algorithm to choose the most suitable language based on your theme. As a result, you will receive a clear and comprehensive piece that is interesting for a wide circle of people.

Entertainment Speech Maker

If you want to entertain your listeners while delivering a crucial message, then Entertainment Speech Maker is for you. With the help of this online generator, you can write well-organized pieces that encourage the target audience to follow you until the end. Moreover, The Speech Maker can come in handy when you need to compose a ceremonial or motivational speech, guaranteeing it will resonate with your audience on intellectual and emotional levels.

Debate Speech Maker

Debate Script Maker is an indispensable assistant for students preparing for formal debates or composing an argumentative essay. This online tool can formulate strong arguments, outline compelling points, and refute counterarguments. With our Debate Script Maker, you will learn how to develop powerful statements and defend your point of view.

Chat GPT Essay Generator

Chat GPT Essay Generator is an online tool utilizing advanced AI algorithms to assist with writing essays. By analyzing your chosen topic and key points, it can generate a draft, suggest arguments, and outline a logical structure for your future work. Besides, you can use this tool as a source of inspiration for your academic assignments, exploring topic ideas you have not considered before.

Discussion Board Response Generator

The Discussion Board Response Generator is a valuable online tool that is also working on AI technology. Its fundamental goal is to produce high-quality responses or posts to any discussion board topic. The generator is designed to understand the context with all nuances and provide grammatically correct, relevant, and authentic results.

Article Critique Maker

If you struggle to give a clear and comprehensive evaluation of the article, then Article Critique Maker is for you. The tool can analyze the text, identifying its key points, strengths, and potential limitations. Besides, Article Critique Maker helps write a concluding paragraph with a summary of your paper analysis and offers recommendations for further research.

️🖊️ AI Tools for Writing Various Essay Parts

Want to generate separate essay parts with the help of free writing tools? Check out the details below!

Research Paper Outline Generator

Research Paper Outline Generator is an effective online tool that can assist you in creating a well-structured outline relevant to your research topic. Working on AI algorithms, the generator identifies key sections of your future work, such as the introduction, thesis statement, supporting arguments, and conclusion. The exceptional feature of the tool is the variety of assignment types it can generate outlines for – all kinds of essays, literature reviews, theses, proposals, etc.

AI Question Generator from Text

If you need to make a list of questions for an assignment, use the AI Question Generator from Text . The tool works with the help of artificial intelligence technology and can generate thought-provoking questions based on the content you provide. Besides research purposes, the generator can also be useful for brainstorming, quizzes, tests, or discussions.

Abstract Generator

Abstract Generator for Research Papers can provide you with a brief overview of the research in a clear and concise manner. This online tool analyzes your topic as well as your findings and generates an abstract highlighting your research question, methodology, key results, and overall significance. As a bonus, the Abstract Generator for Research Papers offers users two options: simple (just paste the text and generate an abstract) and advanced (type each element separately for a more precise result).

Hook Generator

It is always challenging to develop a compelling opening sentence for your paper, and that is where the Hook Examples Generator can come in handy. The tool can generate various hooks, including questions, anecdotes, statistics, and fascinating facts. Additionally, it can recommend appropriate opening sentences based on the essay’s topic and purpose.

Research Introduction Maker

Introduction to Research Generator is a perfect choice if you struggle to formulate an intro for your paper. This online tool works on AI technology and can create a solid introductory paragraph for any type of research. You can also use this generator to learn how to structure a good intro with a hook, background information, and a thesis statement.

Key Points Maker

Key Points Maker is an online tool that can assist students in determining all the essential info in the analyzed content. It can examine various text formats and generate a bulleted list highlighting the necessary details. With the help of Key Points Maker, you can ensure that the key points are concise while fully displaying the objectives and results of the research.

Conclusion Maker

Conclusion Maker for Essays is an excellent online assistant for students. This tool can generate a well-worded concluding paragraph for any paper based on the information received from the user. The primary goal of Conclusion Maker for Essays is to summarize the core arguments and ideas presented in the text, leaving the reader with a lasting impression.

Title Page Generator

Title Page Generator automates the process of creating the front page for your paper. The tool allows students to make formatted title pages in various citation styles, including APA, Harward, MLA, and Chicago. You only need to write the paper’s title, subtitle, author’s full name, and other details.

Citation Generator

Citation Generator for Students is an online tool that helps students with bibliographic references. It provides user-friendly guidance for a variety of citation styles, including APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and Turabian. You can easily cite a book, journal article, website, newspaper article, social media, or other source according to the academic requirements. Besides, the Citation Generator for Students allows you to save, edit, and download the created bibliography lists.

Research Question, Thesis, Hypothesis, Topic Sentence, Problem Statement Makers

Here are 5 more super-effective online tools that you can try:

• Research Question Generator can assist in creating clear and concise research questions based on the provided keywords.
• Hypothesis Maker is a tool for formulating a reasonable hypothesis to guide the student’s investigation.
• Topic sentence generator creates neat sentences to introduce the paragraph’s main point.
• Problem Statement Generator can help students develop a statement on the issue they intend to explore.
• Thesis Statement Generator composes strong thesis statements that effectively define the main point and direction of the work.

💫 Writing Tools to Improve Your Paper

Since text editing is crucial to any writing process, we want to tell you more about practical online tools that can significantly improve your paper!

Summarizing Tool

Summarizing Tool is a helpful resource for students struggling with lengthy texts. It is designed to transform extensive passages into smaller sections without distorting their actual meaning and vital details. You can use this Summarizing Tool to shorten your text or get the main idea of a lengthy article you don’t have time to read.

Paraphrasing Tool

Paraphrasing Tool is a perfect choice if you need to replace specific words with synonyms or change the structure of the sentences. Its fundamental goal is to provide grammatically correct paraphrases, which may help avoid plagiarism and improve the overall flow of the text. The best part of the Paraphrasing Tool is that you can regulate the percentage of replaced words, adjusting the final result to your needs.

Essay Extender

If you ever had problems reaching the required word count of a paper, then Essay Extender is for you. The tool utilizes artificial intelligence to generate additional content based on existing content. The essential purpose of Essay Extender is to expand the paper while preserving the original arguments’ coherence and relevance. With the advanced version of the tool, you can specify which part to enhance – introduction, body, or conclusion.

AI Humanizer

An AI checker might mark a text as suspicious even if you used ChatGPT ethically or didn’t use it at all while creating it. Such trouble occurs more often with content on technical and law topics requiring specific vocabulary. In this case, you can either manually improve your text or use an AI humanizer to add smoothness and human touch.

🔎 Best AI Tools to Check Your Academic Writing

Reviewing your piece of writing can not only help you avoid unintentional typos and mistakes but also identify weaknesses and writing inconsistencies. Below, we will discuss tools that can help you polish the paper.

Grammar Checker

Grammar and punctuation checkers play a vital role in the proofreading process. Such tools can quickly identify grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes, improving the clarity and conciseness of your work. By utilizing online checkers, students may boost the quality of their writing and present polished work that effectively conveys their ideas.

Plagiarism Checker

If you want to avoid unintentional plagiarism in your work, then Plagiarism Checker can be super-beneficial for you. To identify unoriginal content, the tool compares the text you want to examine to vast academic databases, books, scholarly articles, and offline sources. As a result, you can reword adopted lines and ensure your work meets all the academic integrity requirements.

AI Essay Checker

AI Essay Checker is a helpful online tool created to identify the likelihood of a text being written by artificial intelligence. The Checker scans the content for matches with the enormous data sets of AI-written texts and predicts how common are the words you use in a given context. The more the amount of predictable words in the text, the higher the likelihood that AI generated the text.

Read My Essay

Read My Essay is a text-to-speech tool that can be extremely useful for proofreading and memorizing. This tool can read your writing aloud to help you identify errors and determine whether your words sound decent. You can also use the Read My Essay tool if you have many academic papers to read for your research or a lot of new material to memorize.

🪶 AI-Powered Writing Tools to Help with Literature

Looking for online assistants that can come in handy with your assignments on Literature? Read on to find out more details about such tools!

Poem Analyzer

Poem Analyzer is an efficient online tool that works on AI algorithms. This tool does not just provide an overview of the poetic work. Instead, it focuses on finding the text’s deeper message by analyzing elements like themes, figures of speech, and literary devices.

Rhetorical Device Finder

If you are stuck while analyzing any type of text, then Rhetorical Device Finder is a perfect helper for you. This online tool can effectively investigate a speech, presentation, or essay, identifying the author’s purpose and the rhetorical strategies (logos, pathos, and ethos) employed. Besides, the tool assists students in evaluating how efficiently the author broadcasts their ideas.

Quote Explainer

Quote Explainer is an online helper that can aid students in deciphering quotes. The device analyzes the chosen quotation and uncovers its hidden and intended meanings. In addition, Quote Explainer considers the author’s emotions and goals, as well as the quote’s potential significance within the broader context.

🎟️ Tips for Using AI Tools for Academic Writing

To protect yourself from unintentional academic dishonesty and use AI tools ethically, follow 5 crucial tips!

Follow Your Institution’s Policy

Most schools have clear policies against plagiarism and using ChatGPT to cheat . Violation of these rules may result in failing grades, suspension, or even expulsion. To avoid such unpleasant consequences, we recommend you learn as much as possible about the academic integrity code in your educational institution by visiting its website or asking your professor.

A credible source is one written by a trustworthy writer or organization, free from bias, and backed up with evidence. Since automated online tools do not always provide reliable data, their responses must be double-checked. To effectively fact-check the information obtained from AI tools, utilize specialized research platforms that offer global news data on trending topics. Such a method will save you time and boost your confidence in the accuracy of the information you provide.

Use AI Writing Tools as a Supplement

Utilizing an AI model as an assistant in specific situations is much better than asking it to write your tasks from scratch . When used correctly, AI tools can be valuable resources for improving your academic writing and research skills. For instance, you can utilize them to get inspiration, check grammar and punctuation, or paraphrase or summarize text. Furthermore, some AI writing tools can analyze your writing style and suggest improvement.

Mention You’ve Used AI Tools

It is important always to be transparent about using AI tools . For instance, if you paraphrased or directly quoted any content generated by ChatGPT, you must refer to the generator as a source. It is recommended to briefly describe how you have used the tool and the generated content in your writing.

Cite All AI Writing Tools Properly

When integrating raw AI-generated content into your work as a primary source, it is essential to cite its usage properly . Failure to do so may result in plagiarism or cheating accusations . To maintain academic integrity and transparency in your writing process, we recommend citing ChatGPT as any other evidence.

Thank you for reading this article!

If you’re wishing to delve deeper into the topic, check out the following articles:

• How to Use ChatGPT for Research & Paper Writing: Prompts & Ideas
• Using ChatGPT to Edit Essays
• How to Make ChatGPT Write Longer Essays
• How to Make AI-Generated Text Undetectable
• Why You Need to Fact-Check AI-Generated Content for Misinformation
• Acknowledging AI tools and technologies
• How you should—and shouldn’t—use ChatGPT as a student | Open Universities Australia
• OpenAI’s ChatGPT – What It Is, How to Use It, & Why It Matters
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• Library & Technology
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• Citing Sources
• Citing Generative AI

Citing Sources: Citing Generative AI

• Citation Basics
• Writing & Citing
• Chicago: Notes
• Other Styles
• Indigo Book (Legal Citations)
• Citation Tools

Introduction

AI tools are rapidly evolving, and the guidance on how to cite content from or acknowledge the use of generative AI from publishers and other scholarly organizations is still being refined. Make sure you know and follow the policies for the class or publication you for which you are writing.

On This Guide

General Principles

When should you cite, elements to save when using chatgpt or other ai tools.

• Sources cited by AI

While generative AI tools are relatively new, the reasons we cite (to give credit for ideas you present and allow readers to understand the process and sources you consulted in your work) remain the same. Accordingly, you should cite when an AI tool was used to:

• Gather information
• Synthesize ideas or find connections
• Clean/manipulate data

Regardless of the citation style or system of references you are using, you will need:

• Tool name and version (e.g., ChatGPT 4.0)
• Time and date of usage
• Prompt or query
• Output from generative AI tool (as a document, image, or webpage, if the tool does not allow for stable links )
• Follow up queries and responses
• Name of person who queried

Generative AI tools can provide different outputs in response to identical same prompts, so documenting your use of these tools is essential for you to cite them transparently and for later readers to understand your use of the tool.

• Saving AI Content for Replication and Citations [MIT Libraries] - Tips for how to document generative AI interactions.

Sources Cited by Generative AI

The nature of large language models (LLM) behind many generative AI products leads the tools to fabricate (or hallucinate) facts, such as sources that may not exist.

• These citations may even seem to be highly plausible, using the names of real authors or journal titles in a given field.
• Even tools that provide direct links to sources (such as those that are connected to some form of internet search) may misrepresent the content of the materials they cite.
• Always check a source yourself to make it less likely you end up using false or misleading information.

It would also be a good idea to cite reputable sources in your work, in addition to attributing your use of generative AI. In this way you can give direct credit to authors and institutions instead of AI tools that are trained on this human-generated information.

Citing Generative AI in APA

How to cite ChatGPT [APA Style Blog]

APA recommends that you credit the AI tool as an author in a reference list, as:

• "the results of a ChatGPT 'chat' are not retrievable by other readers ,
• and although non-retrievable data or quotations in APA Style papers are usually cited as personal communications, with ChatGPT-generated text there is no person communicating .
• Quoting ChatGPT’s text from a chat session is, therefore, more like sharing an algorithm’s output; thus, credit the author of the algorithm with a reference list entry and the corresponding in-text citation "  [Quoted from APA Style Blog above, last updated Feb 23, 2024.]

APA's position can be extended to output from other generative AI tools. APA uses the Software reference list format to cite material created by generative AI.

In-Text Citation

Reference format.

Author. (YYYY). Name of software (Date version) [Type of AI model]. URL

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat

Guidelines for Acknowledging AI Use:

• FOR RESEARCH METHODS: "Describe how you used the tool in your Method section."
• FOR LITERATURE REVIEWS or ESSAYS: "Describe how you used the tool in your introduction. In your text, provide the prompt you used and then any portion of the relevant text that was generated in response."
• FOR REFERENCES: "Credit the author of the algorithm with a reference list entry and the corresponding in-text citation"

Citing Generative AI in Chicago

How do you recommend citing content developed or generated by artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT? [Chicago Style Q&A]

Chicago recommends that you credit the AI tool as an author:

• "you must credit ChatGPT when you reproduce its words within your own work,
• but unless you include a publicly available URL , that information should be put in the text or in a note—not in a bibliography or reference list." [Quoted from Chicago Style Q&A above]

Chicago uses the Personal correspondence reference list format to cite material created by generative AI (see CMOS 14.214 and 15.53 ).

According to Chicago's linked Q&A, for most types of writing, "you can simply acknowledge the AI tool in your text", e.g.:

• 2 cups flour
• 1 package active dry yeast ...

For student papers or other situations that require more formal citation, Chicago recommends the following format:

Name of AI Tool, Company that created AI tool, Date Content was generated, URL (to tool if no direct public link to content is available).

1. Text generated by ChatGPT, OpenAI, March 7, 2023, https://chat.openai.com/chat.

or (if text of prompt is not included in the body of the text):

1. ChatGPT, response to “Explain how to make pizza dough from common household ingredients,” OpenAI, March 7, 2023.

Citing Generative AI in MLA

How do I cite generative AI in MLA style? [MLA Style Center]

MLA recommends that you do not credit the AI tool as an author when citing content created by a generative AI tool:

"We do not recommend treating the AI tool as an author. This recommendation follows the policies developed by various publishers, including the MLA’s journal PMLA ."   [Quoted from MLA Style Center above, published 17 March 2023.]

Some worked examples included in the linked guide are:

• Example 1: Paraphrasing Text
• Example 2: Quoting Text
• Example 3: Citing Creative Visual Works
• Example 4: Quoting Creative Textual Works
• Example 5: Citing Secondary Sources Used by an AI Tool

EXAMPLE : Paraphrasing Text

Paraphrased in your prose, works-cited-list entry format.

"Title of Source". Title of AI tool , Version of AI tool, Company that created AI tool, Date content was generated, URL.

Works-Cited-List Entry

  “Describe the symbolism of the green light in the book The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald” prompt. ChatGPT , 13 Feb. version, OpenAI, 8 Mar. 2023, chat.openai.com/chat.

• Cite a generative AI tool whenever you paraphrase, quote, or incorporate into your own work any content (whether text, image, data, or other) that was created by it.
• Acknowledge all functional uses of the tool (like editing your prose or translating words) in a note, your text, or another suitable location, take care to vet the secondary sources it cites.

Publisher Recommendations on AI Use

The following are a selection of publishers' policies for using AI tools or including AI-generated content in writing.

APA: Policy on the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in scholarly materials

Elsevier: Publishing Ethics and AI

IEEE: Submission Policies

Nature : Policy on AI

PLOS ONE: Ethical Publishing Practice on Artificial Intelligence Tools and Technologies

Sage: Assistive and Generative AI Guidelines for Authors

Springer Nature: Policy on AI authorship, Generative AI Images, and AI Use by Peer Reviewers

Taylor & Francis: Clarification on the Responsible use of AI Tools in Academic Content Creation

Wiley: Guideline for Authors Regarding Generative AI

Attribution

This LibGuide is adapted from Artificial Intelligence for Research and Scholarship from the Harvard Library and from Citing AI tools from the MIT Libraries . This LibGuide is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License . If you would like to reuse any part of this LibGuide for noncommercial purposes, please credit the guide's creators or the original content creator as noted, and include a link to the source. 

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