AI and Essay Writing

The question

If AI systems can brainstorm, research and write 100s of essays in minutes, all day long, for as long as they are prompted to, it’s at least reasonable to question whether there’s a point in students trying to write an essay at all.

More broadly, the reality of Gen AI tools raises questions about academia in general. Is it wise to begin, or even continue, studying at university when we have computers running cognitive rings around us? Is it not better to reorientate towards a profession that Gen AI will not be able to replace?

To everyone asking themselves or others these questions, particularly as they relate to the decision of whether to write essays with ChatGPT or not – I’d like to say the following.

The answer

There is still very good reason to continue tapping away at a keyboard, scouring journals and scribbling on paper in pursuit of an excellent essay.

This is because the value of writing an essay isn’t always in the essay itself; it is more often found in the process you go through to write it.

Now for those very much in the throes of academic essay writing as we speak, a reasonable rebuttal might go something like this:

“That is all well and good Sam, but I don’t get marked on the process I went through to write an essay, I get marked on the essay I hand in.”

The argument against this position is one that is relevant to various domains of life in our modern-day world.

Whether it’s friendships, dating, health, wealth or entertainment, we don’t have to look far to find a product or service that promotes, and in some cases delivers, an easy and convenient path to fulfilment in these areas.

Generative AI and essay writing is the newest manifestation of this, where we have a product and service that can bypass the usual process we would go through to write a great essay.

Framed in this way, it’s likely using Gen AI for essay writing will be popular – at least at first.

But as we have learned already in the 21^st century, relying on the easy and convenient option is rarely good for us in the long-run, and evidence concerning the negative implications of Gen AI use is already building:

• AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking

• Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

In short, not only do you lose out on the university education you are paying for by getting Gen AI to write your essays, but you also appear to be making yourself much less capable of writing them in the first place.

This means the more you use ChatGPT to write your essays, the harder it gets to write an essay yourself, even an essay of your current standards, let alone the ones you’d produce if you didn’t use Chat GPT.

In the context of academia, this means you take your education, and give it to the machine.

The solution

I like adages for the reason that they are normally very, very true.

So, in this case, the solution is to use it or lose it.

Keep putting in effort, and in doing so, keep your critical thinking skills and your capacity to write good essays.

But this is not to say we should dispel completely with Gen AI, because after we’ve decided to keep our critical thinking skills and our capacity to write good essays, we can add in Gen AI use as the cherry on top.

How exactly we do this will be the topic of my next article.

So, stay tuned, and thanks for reading--