Image credit: depositphotos.com/stock-photos

There’s a new trend sweeping America’s campuses, and it is changing the way that students write their papers. As every college student knows, writing an essay is hard work, and nobody enjoys doing it. That’s one reason that students expend almost as much effort trying to get out of writing their papers as they do actually writing them.

Thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence, it is now possible to have a machine write a convincing academic paper that sounds like a college student actually wrote it. However, these machine-written term papers aren’t everything they’re cracked up to be, and relying on a computer to do your homework can lead to some serious problems.

Let’s take a deeper look into the world of AI writing.

What Is AI Writing?

Artificial intelligence can now be used to generate convincing-looking academic text. Similar to how your phone can make autocomplete guesses about your next word, AI can take input and use predictive models to generate the text of an essay. For example, let’s take a look at a sample using a popular online AI platform to generate a paragraph. Let’s ask our AI to generate a discussion about how to answer a question. Here is what the AI returned:

So if there are just three simple problems with arguing for the evidence for an event, why are you trying to persuade me to believe it is just coincidence in fact?

Let's examine what happens when we tell ourselves that one of three problems is that of proof, something we may call certainty. Suppose in this case we think the one we're talking about was a possibility if we're saying something like "I believe that there is a possibility we have where there are multiple candidates for the same condition on God's throne."

To that end there could be three possible answers, all of which have different results.

This is a fairly plausible section of a student essay. It sounds like something a freshman would write. But the question is whether it is good work. Here, even the best AI tends to fall down on the job. While AI can produce writing that is good enough to fool the casual reader and to imitate college writing, it does not produce writing that is actually accurate. 

Consider this paragraph we asked the AI to write about Marilyn Monroe:

I mean, it's not like you don't see this little thing, we are just about to come out of the closet, and you see, "It was so easy!", but because of my experience and because I was living on the inside, it was very hard to tell which of her three daughters were the ones on the edge of tears as we made our final movie together. And then, when I heard you saying she was a star—I thought, this is brilliant. She was the one who had the heart. [Editor's note: This was on May 13, 1986]

None of that is correct. Marilyn Monroe did not come out of the closet, did not have three daughters, and did not live into the 1980s. The AI can make something that sounds plausible, but only if you don’t know what it’s supposed to be talking about. Indeed, it will often generate fake sources that seem real but do not actually exist.

 

Real Academic Writing 

While it is possible that in the future AI might be able to write higher quality essays that contain real facts and actual research, for now, it simply does not compare to actual academic writing. When students need help on a paper, an online academic writing service is a much better choice. When you hire professional writers to create an essay for you, you will receive the kind of writing assistance that only a real, live human being can provide. Real academic writers research using actual sources and known how to extract true facts from them to develop strong papers. Real academic writers also create serious and supportable arguments rather than blisters that don't actually say anything of value.

The human factor simply cannot be measured. Human beings are better able to deploy logic, evidence, reasoning, and even emotion. Machines, as of yet, cannot imitate a full academic argument. Therefore, when you need help on an essay, a professional writer is the way to go. You need an essay that will help you to achieve your essay's goals and to earn a great grade, not merely to fill space with random text.

However, there may be cases when AI writing can be helpful. When it comes to creative writing, letting a machine run wild with a story can generate interesting new possibilities that you might not think of on your own. That said, it’s not very likely that even great AI will create a story that is 100% perfect. You always need a human eye to go over any machine-generated text to ensure it makes sense.

 

Final Thoughts

Machine-generated AI text can be an interesting exercise to help spark your creativity, but you shouldn’t rely on it to write your homework. The text is unlikely to be accurate, will often be full of mistakes, and probably will have little to do with your actual topic. Your instructor will easily identify text that doesn’t sound like you wrote it, so be sure that whatever you turn in is your own work.