ai for essay writing

ai for essay writing

The Impact of AI on Essay Writing

1. Introduction to AI for Essay Writing

But what exactly is AI? Modern-day definitions of AI typically revolve around the idea of intelligent agents. An intelligent agent is something that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximize its chances of success towards some goal. This simple definition covers a vast area of the current tech hype. For robotics or automated manufacturing, the definition would shape around physical actions done in an environment that’s observed through sensors. In essay writing, AI can take on multiple different guises: it can be an automated essay checker that assists in providing grammar and spelling tips, it can be a service that provides a ‘first draft’ of a piece, it can be a program that takes a finished essay and checks for alterations that could be made. All of these are different examples of different levels of interaction between human and computer-based intelligent agents; the essay could be produced under almost complete direction of the AI, or it could be used merely as a proofreader. The Oxford dictionary tells us that AI is “the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence,” but Zohar Lazar tells us that AI is “whatever hasn’t been done yet.” This, in a sense, is a complimentary statement – Joshua Hemmings, in his book ‘AI: A beginner’s guide’ tells us that the concept of what (if we can even use such a word in this context) is AI has been continuously a bit further on from what has been currently being researched/developed. So whilst 40 years ago, a simple chatbot could be heralded as ‘true’ AI purely because it was not programmed to return the same answers each time, nowadays a chatbot must be capable of navigating through previous responses and any personal details given in conversation to be considered a valid example of AI.

2. Benefits of AI in Essay Writing

The use of AI in essay writing offers a plethora of benefits. Firstly, it allows for efficiency, as with the use of AI, students can complete the writing process much faster. This is because AI is able to provide the most relevant and up-to-date research findings and sources. In addition, as mentioned earlier, AI offers assistance in helping to improve the quality of students’ writing. Through providing suggestions on sentence structure, grammar, and vocabulary, AI can help students to improve and develop their writing styles – something which is much more difficult to achieve with traditional teaching and support. Furthermore, AI can be used to help tailor writing support to the individual needs of students, thus making the process of writing more effective and targeted. For example, an AI system may be programmed to recognize when a student repeatedly makes a particular grammar or lexical mistake and focus its suggestions on helping the student learn how to overcome this, serving to facilitate the learning process. This provides a much more effective level of support than would be possible in a classroom environment. Also, and importantly, AI can help to demystify the writing process and reduce students’ anxiety levels. By providing more targeted and effective support than a human teacher can offer, students may feel more in control of their learning and more confident in their ability to overcome the challenges of writing. This could have a significant impact on attainment and achievement at all levels of education. It is worth noting that these benefits are not just limited to the context of teaching and learning. Those who, for example, have a first language other than English or who have limited literacy skills, may face increased barriers when attempting to write. By making writing and composition more accessible and providing tailored support, AI could enable such individuals to communicate more effectively. In the workplace, AI could provide similar support to that discussed in the context of education, increasing productivity and efficiency. With technology ever advancing and online platforms becoming increasingly central to the provision and delivery of services, the ability to write effectively online is becoming more and more important. AI has great potential to help meet the demands of students, employees, and service providers in our digital world. All these benefits and potentials mentioned above demonstrate how AI has revolutionized essay writing. By taking the advantages of AI, students can benefit from improved writing quality and obtaining more opportunities and better grades. AI promises a lot of potential in optimizing the writing process. While AI benefits both individual essay writing and business writing, the focuses and interests may vary. It is important to acknowledge the fast AI development in the writing field. With the increasing demand for high-standard essays and the rapid development of AI, the integration between AI and essay writing will become more tight and the works of AI in writing will be further explored. It is exciting to see how AI may master human language and potentially write essays for humans one day.

3. Challenges and Limitations of AI in Essay Writing

Another challenge is the quality of essays. AI-generated essays may not be consistent in quality. This is because some AI models may not be able to produce coherent essays, even though they may be able to generate essays that are grammatically correct. Therefore, more sophisticated AI models, which may include various AI algorithms, are required to address the quality issue. Moreover, the use of AI may pose a threat to the employment of professional essay writers as the development of sophisticated AI models may render human input redundant. This is a serious ethical consideration that needs to be taken into account when using AI for essay writing. We have to make sure that the use of AI does not exploit or shut down human labour. As such, any automation of essay writing should be carefully executed in a way that allows both AI and human writers to work together so that the strengths of both approaches can be captured. Such a hybrid approach can also offer productive pedagogical possibilities; for instance, an AI model with the capability of providing essay feedback may be used to assist students in self-learning, alongside with human guidance. The essay reflects a critical examination of the current and future uses of AI, and it is clear that the use of sophisticated AI models in essay writing may provide more accurate and helpful feedback to students. However, all stakeholders, such as developers, policy makers, educators and students, have to ensure that such ethical use of AI can be realised. Adhering to this ethical framework, the potential challenges associated with AI in essay writing, in particular the limitation of essay quality, can be addressed strategically.

4. Ethical Considerations in AI for Essay Writing

From passing off work that is not their own to perpetrating cyberbullying by producing papers that are hurtful, the proliferation of essay writing services facilitated by artificial intelligence (AI) presents a range of new ethical challenges to the time-honored traditions of academic integrity. In an increasingly digitized world in which we are accustomed to services being shaped to our individual needs and in which we sleepwalk much of the time through the terms and conditions that institutions ask us to approve, the heuristics of consent, transparency, justice, and accountability become centrally important, as does the question of how compliance with these goals can be safely and effectively ensured in the fledgling automated essay industry. For example, one must ask the question as to who retains the copyright in the essay produced by a machine: Is it the student, the provider of the essay writing service, or the programmer of the AI writing tool? Similarly, students utilizing AI essay drafting tools could potentially be exposed to risk if difficult concepts or jargon in essay feedback generated via speech synthesis are ‘lost in translation’, leading to an allegation of academic misconduct on the basis of apparent failure to address the comments. Therefore, in the context of increasing use of AI writing tools, proper regulatory measures and ethical safeguards that not only ensure meaningful consent but also heighten transparency and accountability in line with the principles of distributive and procedural justice must be conceived and implemented. For instance, it could be legislated that before an automated essay service is used to generate a substantive initial draft, the service must log the user’s confirmation that the conditions under which the software generates essays, including any online connection requirements and digitally displayed terms and conditions, were explained to the user in a mandatory language and that the user has indicated understanding of those explanations and agreed to essay production in those conditions.

5. Future Possibilities and Conclusion

In the future, it is likely that AI will be used to a greater extent in essay writing. One possibility is the development of a more advanced digital writing assistant that extends beyond providing feedback on grammar and syntax, and can actually generate entire sentences and paragraphs. Such a tool would be especially useful for students who struggle with the writing process. They would be able to give the digital assistant their early ideas and it would be able to generate a coherent and well-structured essay, complete with explanations for the various sections and choices of vocabulary. This would free up much more time for students to engage with the critical thinking element of essay writing. However, many think that tools of that nature will never get developed. Professor Derek Soles, an expert in writing skills at the university, says that, “The real skill in teaching essay writing is to be able to generate unique, original sentences and arguments and that is something we will never truly be able to develop a computer system for.” There are other possibilities too. AI has the potential to transform marking essays. For example, “automated systems with the potential to create comparable marking to human teaching assistants and markers”, according to Dr. Mark Hirst, who is a computer scientist and digital learning academic at the university. In recent years, we have seen the first examples of AI tools being used in essay marking. However, there are many ethical impacts that need to be thoroughly considered before this use of AI could ever become widespread. For example, “there needs to be complete transparency in how the data that the AI uses to mark essays is put in and the ability for a student to be able to quickly and effectively appeal any decisions that the AI system has made” says Dr. Hirst. From his explanation, we can conclude that in addition to the possibilities that AI has to transform how we teach essay writing, it also looks likely that it’ll transform how essays are marked in the future. However, it’s vital to consider the potential ethical and legal issues surrounding the use of such technology before it becomes a dominant part of the education system. In summary, while AI is likely to bring huge benefits to students and teachers in essay writing and the feedback and assessment of work. However, it’s important for human teachers and students to continuously engage with the technology in order to raise any concerns that need to be addressed and to better develop the technology in the most effective ways.