AI & Academia: How to Use AI for Essay Writing (P1. 1)

A helpful essay-writing assistant

Context

If you haven’t read it yet, I recently wrote an articles on AI and academia. One of the main points I raise is that using Gen AI in the wrong way can reduce critical thinking capacity and originality in essay writing. In short, you lose your academic gift and give it to machines. Not good.

That said, Gen AI is obviously not all that bad, and while academic institutions across the country and world generally encourage students to “avoid” this technology in the context of essay writing, it is not going to stop students from using it to help them write their essays, and get the highest degree grades they can.

With that in mind, let’s have a look at how we can use products like Chat GPT to help you write essays, without plagiarising work, and without losing any of your much-needed critical thinking skills.

Case study

There are many ways to do this, all of which I will cover over the next few articles, but to begin, let’s start with the first part of an academic essay, the ideation stage, as an example.

Let’s imagine we are tasked with the following question:

"Is virtue ethics a coherent ethical theory?"

Before engaging at all with a Generative AI model, it’s useful to formulate a short, sharp and intuitive answer to this question. If the question comes with set readings, then make sure you read these first – at least so that you know loosely what they’re discussing and arguing for.  

In any case, you might end up with an intuitive answer that looks something like this:

“Yes, virtue ethics is a coherent ethical position because it is logically consistent and flexible in application.”

Using this, you can now engage with Generative AI to develop things further. You can ask it something like this:  

“I’m writing an essay on the following question: ‘Is virtue ethics a coherent ethical theory?”. My initial response is as follows: ‘Yes, virtue ethics is a coherent ethical theory because it is logically consistent and practically flexible.’ Present a strong counter argument to this claim.

The reason this works is because we are immediately challenging our intuitive response to the answer. In doing so, we,

1.      Maintain the motivation to continue exploring the quality of our own argument, and

2.      Get a sense of what a general counter-argument to this claim looks like.

Here’s the AI’s response, paraphrased:

“Virtue ethics is not coherent because it lacks a clear guide to action, and promotes moral conflict.”

Okay great. So, we now have a springboard from which to develop our argument. We can use this counterargument to dive into the literature on virtue ethics, and work towards objecting to these arguments in favour of our own.

To do this, prompt Gen AI with something like the following:

“Give me the most cited papers on virtue ethics that engage with the counterarguments you presented”

At this stage, you’ll be given a selection of papers. You can now find and read the ones you like. And from there, your essay is well on its way to being written.

Conclusion

This is a great way to begin your essay, especially if you are unfamiliar with producing objections and counter-objections. So, try this out when you next write an essay, and let me know what you think.

Remember, this is only one of many ways to use it, and I’ll be sharing more over the next few weeks.

If you haven’t read my first article on AI, then you can do so by clicking below.

The article discusses how and why Generative AI should be used to support your thinking, and not as a substitute for the thinking itself.

With that in mind, you’re bound to flourish.