Can AI-Written Essays Be Stopped? (Part 2/2): Using AI To (Responsibly) Write Your Essay

Welcome to this week’s Deep-Fried Dive with Fry Guy! In these long-form articles, Fry Guy conducts in-depth analyses of cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) developments and developers. Today, Fry Guy dives into the controversy surrounding AI-written essays in education (Part 2). We hope you enjoy!

*Notice: We do not receive any monetary compensation from the people and projects we feature in the Sunday Deep-Fried Dives with Fry Guy. We explore these projects and developers solely to reveal interesting and cutting-edge AI developments and uses.*

In a world being overrun by AI, students are using ChatGPT and its friends to write their essays in school. Unfortunately, many of them are using AI very poorly.

Last week, our deep dive explored the controversy surrounding AI in education, particularly students using AI to write their essays. Throughout our discussion, we explored the growing use of AI by students and problems with trying to stop it. At the end of the deep dive, we proposed taking a step back to consider whether stopping students from using AI altogether is the best approach, given the broader aims of education. We ended by proposing that the following question is one of great importance: Can we find a way to teach students how to leverage AI models to produce writing that maximizes their unique writing abilities, without sacrificing a worthwhile education in writing skills?

Today, we plan to answer that question.

USHERING IN A NEW TECHNOLOGY

Over the course of history, there have been countless tools that came along to make our lives easier. We might consider the lightbulb, the printing press, the steam engine, the wheel, the cellphone, or the internet—the list goes on and on. These tools, each in their own way, dramatically changed the way we did things. Sure, upon their invention and implementation, there was quite a bit of pushback, but that’s to be expected. When push comes to shove, most people don’t like change. But over time, we’ve come to accept these great innovations and had to learn how to use them. After all, could you imagine how difficult it would be to live in modern-day society without lightbulbs or telephones? Our society has evolved around these technologies in a way that makes it almost impossible to function normally in society without them. Years from now, might the same be said for AI?

AI, of course, has its problems and causes for concern. But there is no denying that it is impressive. AI can organize your finances, create and edit pictures and videos, answer your emails, and much more! Along with these great capabilities, it has the ability to write essays of all kinds, and pretty good ones too. But even though AI has the ability to write well, many in education are still trying to block students from using the technology. As we discussed last week, this is mostly due to a fear that students will lose the ability to write or take advantage of the education system. However, the same might have been said of hand-writing when the keyboard was invented or of learning vocabulary before dictionaries and spellcheck. But without knowing how to adjust to such technologies, we would be outcasts in today’s society—we would have to live aloof from the common functionality of the modern day.

AI is ushering in a new wave of technological innovation. Instead of using our fists to pound a nail or a handsaw to cut down a tree, we have been given a hammer, an electric saw—a new tool to help us with the complex task of writing. So let’s learn how to use it.

HOW TO USE AI TO (RESPONSIBLY) WRITE YOUR ESSAY

Yikes! The title of this section might scare some people. But for those on board with this new approach, we want to challenge you to buckle up and consider these ideas.

Despite a common (albeit false) dichotomy between AI and proficient human writing, there are many ways AI can be used to responsibly write essays—essays that enhance, rather than replace, the research and writing abilities of humans.

Of course, the way AI can be used to effectively write an essay is going to depend on the type of essay, the extent of the research needed, and what the goal of the assignment is. For our purposes, we will consider a basic research paper. This is the most common paper written in school.

To write a good research paper, it’s first important to have a quality topic. If you know your topic already, great. If not, AI can help with that! Start by choosing a large language model (LLM)—ChatGPT will do just fine. Then, ask it for some topic ideas. You can use the following prompt: “Give me some ideas for a research paper on [insert your general topic].

For example purposes, I asked ChatGPT to give me topic ideas for a research paper on French fries. I got a list of 8 topics with descriptions of what I could write about! I surveyed the topics myself and chose which one I found most interesting: French fries in pop culture.

After ChatGPT helps guide you to a topic, it’s time to do some research. This is an area where many students begin to make mistakes, and teachers of all kinds become uncomfortable. Don’t ask ChatGPT research questions! Sure, if you’d like to get a basic understanding of a broad topic, it can be helpful. But oftentimes ChatGPT will hallucinate or provide you with old (and biased) information. There are better ways to use AI for accurate research.

On the web, there are a plethora of AI tools that can help with research. Most of the good ones, however, are behind a paywall or just flat out don’t deliver quality information. But there is one amazing resource that makes research 100X more efficient: Perplexity.

Perplexity, free and easy to use, scrapes the web for real-time research about any topic, providing links to where the answers were found. This way, you can check to see where the information in its answer came from, attribute credit to the proper sources in your paper, and explore more on the original site if desired. Perplexity also offers the ability for follow-up questions, including recommended follow-up questions. So if the user wants more information about a portion of the answer or thinks of a related question, Perplexity can offer that. The suggested follow-up questions also allow the user to explore areas of their research question they might have never thought about asking.

Talking to perplexity is like talking to a genius about any topic who can refer you to further resources in one click. The best part? It will never judge you for “stupid questions,” and you don’t have to sift through site after site on Google.

By using this information from Perplexity and its recommended resources, you can compile your research on the topic. After gathering some research on the topic (or before doing the research, depending on the specifics of the assignment and preferences of the writer), it might be helpful to put together an outline. To do this, you can go back to ChatGPT or another LLM of choice. To get help creating an outline for your essay, you can use the following prompt or something similar: “Given the following research on [insert topic], create an outline for my essay: [copy and paste research notes here].” In seconds, ChatGPT will create a detailed outline from this simple prompt, coupled with your research.

After looking over the outline and adjusting it to your liking, it’s time to write. Use the research content you have found from Perplexity and the outline from ChatGPT to write your essay. You should have enough information on these topics and guidance to put together a really solid paper, using your own phrasing and writing style.

While writing your initial draft, you will need to cite your sources. There are many AI tools that can help you with this, and LLMs like ChatGPT are not the ones to use. They will often hallucinate, providing you with poor citations that don’t fit grammatical standards. Instead, use a tool like Scribbr, which is free to use and can generate almost any type of citation in one click.

Now that you have a draft of your paper written, it’s time for proofreading. There are many AI tools that you can use to proofread your paper, but the best is Grammarly. By pasting your text into Grammarly, you can get suggestions for improving your writing and fix errors in spelling and grammar. This will give you confidence that your paper is not only well researched, but also looks professional.

After having AI proofread your paper, it’s worth taking one more step (that is, if you want your paper to be awesome). Go back to ChatGPT or the LLM of your choosing, and type the following prompt: “This is my essay about [insert topic]. Can you give me some recommendations to improve my paper?: [copy and paste essay draft here].” ChatGPT will most likely provide you with various suggestions for aspects to expand on or things to improve (Note: The reason you want to do proofreading with Grammarly before this step is to mitigate grammatical suggestions and steer the AI towards content-focused suggestions). Review these suggestions to see if any good points are raised or if there are any areas of the essay you can improve. After adjusting your paper as needed, you can run your paper back through Grammarly to get a final proofread and make any final touches.

At last, your paper is complete, with the help of AI!

*Disclaimer: This article does not give you permission to use AI on your essays or projects. This just highlights an effective strategy for using such technology to write essays more effectively. Before using such strategies, make sure to clear your AI usage with your instructor or any institution for which your writing will be submitted to or represent.*