Artificial Intelligence is quickly becoming a trend and a necessity in different aspects of life. From productivity to entertainment, AI is one of the go-to destinations for people around the world. That’s why there’s no surprise students around the world are using AI just as much.
According to statistics, a lot of institutions around the world increased learning by 62% by simply using AI-based adaptive learning. This is because AI provides great assistance and efficiency in writing and various other aspects of a student’s life. So, there’s no need to say it, but essay writing is no different.
From idea generation through chatbots to correction of written content, AI assists in many ways. But it also has its drawbacks and disadvantages. Now, what are the pros and cons of using AI-powered tools in something like essay writing? Let’s find out.
4 Pros of Using AI-Powered Tools
Essay Contents
Let’s start off with the positives, as a lot of people think of AI as a Skynet-like technology that plans to take over humans. However, it’s not that, as it’s basically just providing assistance in things that took a lot of time before its invention—such as writing.
So, to keep things simple, here are four pros of AI-powered tools and how they provide an advantage in essay writing:
1. Enhanced Efficiency
Efficiency is one of the key benefits of using AI in essay writing—or any sort of writing. That’s because AI shortens the timespan it takes and bridges the gap between the writer and productivity—but we’ll come to that later.
For now, let’s say if a writer wishes to research something specific for their essay, then researching it could take time, especially using Google or any search engine. However, this process can be easily simplified by using an AI chatbot from Openai.com:
As you can see, AI simplifies the research process and helps us understand something complicated with just a few points. Now, this can be used by a lot of writers to improve efficiency. Does it always work? Yes, in most cases, but it does assist quite a bit with research—increasing efficiency in the process.
2. Grammar Correction
Grammar correctors or grammar checkers are one of the leading AI-based tools nowadays. There are certain tools that are online or in downloadable form that help writers on both their phones and PCs/Macs.
That’s because grammar correctors save a ton of time from proofreading and help correct issues within a few seconds. Here’s an example of finding and correcting mistakes with a popular AI-based grammar- checking tool Grammarcheck.ai:
As you can see, it proofreads these 68 words within 4-5 seconds. And the red-marked content you see is misspelled or just spelled wrong entirely. Whereas the yellow mark indicates the wrong choice of word:
Now this is a very simplified process of grammar correction and just one example of how AI-based tools can check grammar. That’s one of the leading reasons these tools are particularly important and famous among essay writers—students or otherwise.
Because not only do these tools to check grammar improve productivity, but they also help focus on more essential factors of essay writing by saving a ton of time.
3. Speedy Content Generation
AI-based content generation isn’t exactly encouraged or accepted in academia today, but it does have its benefits. Now, it’s wrong and unethical to let AI do all the work and use something like ChatGPT to write an entire essay for you.
However, it can be used for ideation and creating outlines. This alone can help generate important content and give the writer a proper platform to get started. Here’s an example:
What you see here is AI helping create an outline that might even take an hour or above manually. So, there’s not even a need to say why this is essential, efficient, or a time-saving procedure because it saves you from doing a ton of work.
Besides, it provides prompts for each heading and formats it correctly. That’s why using AI for content and idea generation is one of the key processes of AI-based assistance in essay writing.
4. Productivity & Effectiveness
Students are usually mainly concerned about the productivity and effectiveness of the content that they write. AI helps reduce that stress by helping instead of procrastinating something that they might have to do, such as rewording or rephrasing.
The good thing about AI is that it provides writing assistants and tools of all kinds. For instance, a good-quality online rewording tool can help a writer be more productive. Let’s say you wish to reword around a hundred words; then here’s how it would look by rewording it with an AI and NLP-based tool Paraphraser.io:
This rewording tool rewrote 100 words within a few seconds. Besides that, it also reworded content efficiently and improved quality in a few ways. This proves how AI-based tools are vital in creating content for essays and saving time.
3 Cons of Using AI-Powered Tools
Now that we know and see the advantages of AI-based tools let’s talk about some disadvantages.
1. Loss of Originality
While AI writing assistants can be great, they can also cause one to lack originality. If a student is constantly writing essays, then asking AI to generate ideas, research, or even outlines can soon cause them to lose their originality; here’s how:
It causes one to stop thinking intellectually;
It removes the necessity to think of ideas on your own;
And it might suggest the same ideas to others who use it.
While GPT-3 and GPT-4 are advanced, they are known to provide similar answers to multiple users in programs like ChatGPT. Therefore, loss of originality is one of the key things.
2. Skill Redundancy
Proofreading, rewriting, and paraphrasing all of these are vital skills that are synonymous with a writer. Now, all of the AI-based tools for these aren’t exactly harmful, but relying on them too much and not doing anything yourself will cause your skills to fade.
That’s why it’s important to use these tools as an extension and assistance whenever you need it—instead of relying on them all the time.
3. Contextual Inaccuracy
AI-based content generation is known to provide inaccurate information in many cases. It’s known to be one of the major causes of AI content being detected right away by some AI detectors. That’s why it’s better to avoid AI-based content generation—except for research, outline, and idea generation.
Conclusion
These are some of the leading pros and cons of using AI in essay writing. It’s important to understand the pros and mind the cons when you use these tools for assistance. But over-reliance on any sort of tool is bad, so it’s important to use them in necessity rather than relying on them.
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