Last updated on March 28th, 2024 at 04:33 am
Thanks to the growth of AI writing tools, you can get a 2000-word essay on any topic in minutes without doing much, at least in theory. However, if you read my essay reviews, you will see that an AI-generated essay can’t compare to one written by a professional writer. Unless you want all your assignments to fail miserably and jeopardize your academic career, entrusting AI with your essays is a bad idea.
And here’s why.
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What Human Essay Writers Can that AI Can’t
There are quite a few popular misconceptions about AI. People largely misunderstand the extent of its abilities, especially regarding AI’s ability to perform tasks that require critical thinking and creativity. So, let’s clarify what AI can and can’t do and, more specifically, address its limitations compared to human writers.
Human writers’ irreplaceable competencies
AI writing tools aren’t as almighty as people seem to believe. First of all, their creativity is nowhere near that of humans. An AI can successfully draft you an outline for a short story or an essay.
But if you have any experience in writing or are an avid reader, a text produced by an AI tool will immediately strike you as unoriginal and full of cliches and inconsistencies. AI is trained using large amounts of data, so it is only natural that it’s prone to recreating some of the most unoriginal and overused tropes and ideas.
AI can recreate a certain line of things and pose as a creative writer. Still, it doesn’t possess creative or critical thinking abilities, unlike human writers. So, if you rely on AI for writing without any or almost any human input, the result will be like a stock picture—bland and predictable.
Why Human Insight Matters
When ChatGPT warns you that it can make factual mistakes, it isn’t being coy. Think of everything that can go wrong if you rely on AI tools for college assignments instead of trusting MyPaperHelp review and hiring a professional writer. The AI writing tools available today are quite advanced, and they can research, but their research and information processing abilities aren’t good enough yet.
If you entrust an AI writer with a complex argumentative essay or an in-depth research paper, the result will likely be mediocre and blatantly wrong. Only a competent human eye can take an AI-generated text to the next level by fixing its flaws. A human writer must spot and correct all the mistakes and develop arguments to be well-thought-out and convincing.
AI’s Role in Academic Writing
While relying entirely on AI writing tools is a losing strategy, this doesn’t mean they can’t be helpful in academic writing. They can, and they are. You just need to use them competently and responsibly, and only for specific tasks.
What’s Good About AI Tools
AI tools are fantastic for providing structural guidance, grammatical correctness, and even generating ideas or rough outlines for your essays. They work incredibly quickly and offer a solid base to build upon. Even the most experienced professional writers often rely on AI tools for outlining because of AI’s ability to structure information coherently.
AI can be particularly helpful in the early stages of writing, such as brainstorming and outlining. One of the things you probably know if you’ve taken a writing course of any kind is that producing a good outline is basically 50% of the entire writing process. So, relying on AI tools can save you precious time and energy.
What’s Not So Good About AI Tools
As discussed, AI writing tools aren’t particularly creative or capable of deep research, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg regarding their limitations. They also struggle with grasping the context, often resulting in generic, underdeveloped, or outright mistaken conclusions.
One thing central to successful academic writing is the writer’s ability to analyze the credibility of the sources they cite in their work. That’s why such a high percentage of a student’s grade for an essay depends on the sources used and referencing.
An AI tool lacks human judgment and is often unable to verify the credibility of a particular source, which leads to disastrous consequences quality-wise.
The AI—Human Writer Cooperation
The key to academic writing is a harmonious balance between AI and human expertise. AI can help and is helping people produce high-quality texts; it just can’t produce them without enough human intervention.
If you’d like to make the most of AI writing tools and turn them into your writing collaborator, here are a few tips:
- Start with AI for efficiency. Use AI tools for initial research, data gathering, and essay structuring. They will give you a decent foundation to build upon.
- Customize the results (or hire a professional writer to do it). Once you have a basic structure, you need a human eye and skillset—your own or a professional writer’s—to personalize and deepen your essay. You must adapt the content to your unique voice, vision, and academic requirements.
- Join forces for research papers. For research papers, use AI for data analysis and initial findings. You or the human writer you hire should then take the time to fact-check and interpret these findings. Crafting a compelling narrative around them is also a person’s job; AI doesn’t do it well.
- Remember about academic integrity. Professors typically encourage using AI tools as an extra source of help, but a fully AI-generated student paper is guaranteed to get a failing grade.
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An Afterword
Your key takeaway from this discussion should be that while AI writing tools are great for some parts of the writing process, they can’t replace an actual writer. If you want your college papers to be good and ensure the success of your academic journey, they need a human eye and expertise. Make AI your writing assistant, but don’t rely on it mindlessly.
