The Whisperers of Ideas: AI’s Contribution to Essay Topic Discovery
With AI being one of the words of the year 2023, it’s no wonder that its place in academia and, more specifically, academic writing is getting more prominent by the day. One of the frequently asked questions that DoMyEssay review experts receive is: what is the place of AI tools in research and writing in academic contexts? Let’s try to be as unbiased as possible and explore it.
AI as the Ultimate Idea Generator
AI writing tools are far from flawless, but they have an unparalleled ability to develop 100+ ideas in minutes. That’s what makes AI such an awesome brainstorming tool. You don’t need to spend hours developing a decent topic for your term paper. Ask ChatGPT or any other similar tool to give you a list of options. The only thing left to do will be to choose.
Invest time and effort in studying the prompting hacks that help effective human-AI communication. You will even be able to get specific, narrow, and evidence-based topics from AI writing tools. According to research, the time spent looking for a good paper topic is 2 hours for an average student, so that’s a smart way to use AI writing tools.
AI’s Key Flaws
However, if you want to use AI for things beyond idea generation (which, let’s face it. Most students do), you need to be careful. As helpful as AI writing tools are, it takes a single look at the best assignment service to see that they don’t come close to the expertise of professional human writers. At this point in its evolution, AI has tons of fundamental flaws, and here are some of them:
Lack of genuine originality
AI-generated texts are inherently unoriginal. No, you likely won’t see much plagiarism in them if that’s what you’re worried about. Or, more accurately, they won’t contain much plagiarism detectable by popular plagiarism checkers available online. But this doesn’t mean that AI-generated writing will align with the principles of academic integrity in terms of originality.
When AI tools generate a supposedly unique test, they retell and repurpose the data fed to them or found online. In most cases, AI doesn’t bother to cite its sources. As a result, you end up with an essay or research paper full of other people’s ideas and no proper references. That’s one of the forms of plagiarism.
Limited research and fact-checking abilities
Recent iterations of popular AI writing tools can google, yes. However, their ability to research and fact-check still leaves much to be desired. If you’re an attentive ChatGPT user, you’ve probably seen its standard warning—“ChatGPT can make mistakes. Consider checking important information.” The same is true for other AI writing tools.
So, while AI is great for initial research and can help you conduct a surface-level analysis of the topic you’re considering, we recommend you take the old-school way for anything beyond that.
Use academic databases and libraries; leaf through hundreds of abstracts on JSTOR or Google Scholar. This may be a much more challenging approach, but it’s much safer than using AI for research.
Inability to think critically
AI writing tools don’t have the critical thinking that humans do, nor do they have empathy. This affects their ability to analyze complex and controversial ideas, making them almost useless for writing high-level academic essays. Even if your professor doesn’t catch you using AI for essay writing, they won’t be impressed with the level of understanding and reasoning AI has.
Also, AI tools’ limited critical thinking gets in the way of their ability to differentiate between reliable and questionable sources. That’s why it’s crucial to fact-check at least the most essential data found and cited by an AI writing tool. Otherwise, you might eventually realize you’ve been arguing the wrong point.
How to Ensure Productive AI-Writer Cooperation
As you can see, AI writing tools can be helpful for some parts of the writing process, but their role is limited. Let’s explore some of the principles of productive AI-human writer collaboration:
Define clear roles
Use AI for initial brainstorming, data gathering, and generating basic outlines. It provides a starting point and handles repetitive or data-driven tasks. In turn, writers should focus on adding creativity, emotional depth, and personal insight. They refine AI-generated ideas and ensure the final output is engaging and human-centric.
Use AI for efficiency
Use AI for grammar checks, improving sentence structure, and ensuring readability. This saves time for writers and allows them to focus on the creative aspects of writing. At the same time, always have human writers review AI suggestions. Writers should critically assess and modify AI-generated content to ensure it aligns with the intended message and tone.
Join forces
Merge AI’s analytical capabilities with human empathy and storytelling skills. This combination will add nuance and emotional depth. Also, encourage writers to learn from AI’s data-driven approaches (and use human feedback to improve AI algorithms). This reciprocal learning will help you get the most out of the AI-human cooperation.
Always Check for Originality!
Unless you want to get in trouble with your school’s academic integrity committee, we recommend you never neglect to check if the text you’ve received from an AI writing tool is indeed unique. Frankly, it likely isn’t, so hiring a human writer to polish it and cite every non-original idea religiously is always safer.
An Afterword
If you want to use AI writing tools for brainstorming and topic discovery, you definitely can and should. They will help you come up with countless ideas to choose from. However, relying entirely on AI writing tools is a mistake.
The essay you will get from ChatGPT (yes, even the paid version) just won’t be good enough for you to get a good grade. The better choice is to hire a human writer and get an outstanding piece of work.
