write an essay with open ai

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How to Get ChatGPT to Write an Essay: Prompts, Outlines, & More

Last Updated: June 2, 2024 Fact Checked

Getting ChatGPT to Write the Essay

Using ai to help you write, expert interview.

This article was co-authored by Bryce Warwick, JD and by wikiHow staff writer, Nicole Levine, MFA . Bryce Warwick is currently the President of Warwick Strategies, an organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area offering premium, personalized private tutoring for the GMAT, LSAT and GRE. Bryce has a JD from the George Washington University Law School. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 51,934 times.

Are you curious about using ChatGPT to write an essay? While most instructors have tools that make it easy to detect AI-written essays, there are ways you can use OpenAI's ChatGPT to write papers without worrying about plagiarism or getting caught. In addition to writing essays for you, ChatGPT can also help you come up with topics, write outlines, find sources, check your grammar, and even format your citations. This wikiHow article will teach you the best ways to use ChatGPT to write essays, including helpful example prompts that will generate impressive papers.

Things You Should Know

• To have ChatGPT write an essay, tell it your topic, word count, type of essay, and facts or viewpoints to include.
• ChatGPT is also useful for generating essay topics, writing outlines, and checking grammar.
• Because ChatGPT can make mistakes and trigger AI-detection alarms, it's better to use AI to assist with writing than have it do the writing.

• Before using the OpenAI's ChatGPT to write your essay, make sure you understand your instructor's policies on AI tools. Using ChatGPT may be against the rules, and it's easy for instructors to detect AI-written essays.
• While you can use ChatGPT to write a polished-looking essay, there are drawbacks. Most importantly, ChatGPT cannot verify facts or provide references. This means that essays created by ChatGPT may contain made-up facts and biased content. [1] X Research source It's best to use ChatGPT for inspiration and examples instead of having it write the essay for you.

• The topic you want to write about.
• Essay length, such as word or page count. Whether you're writing an essay for a class, college application, or even a cover letter , you'll want to tell ChatGPT how much to write.
• Other assignment details, such as type of essay (e.g., personal, book report, etc.) and points to mention.
• If you're writing an argumentative or persuasive essay , know the stance you want to take so ChatGPT can argue your point.
• If you have notes on the topic that you want to include, you can also provide those to ChatGPT.
• When you plan an essay, think of a thesis, a topic sentence, a body paragraph, and the examples you expect to present in each paragraph.
• It can be like an outline and not an extensive sentence-by-sentence structure. It should be a good overview of how the points relate.

• "Write a 2000-word college essay that covers different approaches to gun violence prevention in the United States. Include facts about gun laws and give ideas on how to improve them."
• This prompt not only tells ChatGPT the topic, length, and grade level, but also that the essay is personal. ChatGPT will write the essay in the first-person point of view.
• "Write a 4-page college application essay about an obstacle I have overcome. I am applying to the Geography program and want to be a cartographer. The obstacle is that I have dyslexia. Explain that I have always loved maps, and that having dyslexia makes me better at making them."

Tyrone Showers

Be specific when using ChatGPT. Clear and concise prompts outlining your exact needs help ChatGPT tailor its response. Specify the desired outcome (e.g., creative writing, informative summary, functional resume), any length constraints (word or character count), and the preferred emotional tone (formal, humorous, etc.)

• In our essay about gun control, ChatGPT did not mention school shootings. If we want to discuss this topic in the essay, we can use the prompt, "Discuss school shootings in the essay."
• Let's say we review our college entrance essay and realize that we forgot to mention that we grew up without parents. Add to the essay by saying, "Mention that my parents died when I was young."
• In the Israel-Palestine essay, ChatGPT explored two options for peace: A 2-state solution and a bi-state solution. If you'd rather the essay focus on a single option, ask ChatGPT to remove one. For example, "Change my essay so that it focuses on a bi-state solution."

Pay close attention to the content ChatGPT generates. If you use ChatGPT often, you'll start noticing its patterns, like its tendency to begin articles with phrases like "in today's digital world." Once you spot patterns, you can refine your prompts to steer ChatGPT in a better direction and avoid repetitive content.

• "Give me ideas for an essay about the Israel-Palestine conflict."
• "Ideas for a persuasive essay about a current event."
• "Give me a list of argumentative essay topics about COVID-19 for a Political Science 101 class."

• "Create an outline for an argumentative essay called "The Impact of COVID-19 on the Economy."
• "Write an outline for an essay about positive uses of AI chatbots in schools."
• "Create an outline for a short 2-page essay on disinformation in the 2016 election."

• "Find peer-reviewed sources for advances in using MRNA vaccines for cancer."
• "Give me a list of sources from academic journals about Black feminism in the movie Black Panther."
• "Give me sources for an essay on current efforts to ban children's books in US libraries."

• "Write a 4-page college paper about how global warming is changing the automotive industry in the United States."
• "Write a 750-word personal college entrance essay about how my experience with homelessness as a child has made me more resilient."
• You can even refer to the outline you created with ChatGPT, as the AI bot can reference up to 3000 words from the current conversation. For example: "Write a 1000 word argumentative essay called 'The Impact of COVID-19 on the United States Economy' using the outline you provided. Argue that the government should take more action to support businesses affected by the pandemic."

• One way to do this is to paste a list of the sources you've used, including URLs, book titles, authors, pages, publishers, and other details, into ChatGPT along with the instruction "Create an MLA Works Cited page for these sources."
• You can also ask ChatGPT to provide a list of sources, and then build a Works Cited or References page that includes those sources. You can then replace sources you didn't use with the sources you did use.

Expert Q&A

• Because it's easy for teachers, hiring managers, and college admissions offices to spot AI-written essays, it's best to use your ChatGPT-written essay as a guide to write your own essay. Using the structure and ideas from ChatGPT, write an essay in the same format, but using your own words. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• Always double-check the facts in your essay, and make sure facts are backed up with legitimate sources. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• If you see an error that says ChatGPT is at capacity , wait a few moments and try again. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

• Using ChatGPT to write or assist with your essay may be against your instructor's rules. Make sure you understand the consequences of using ChatGPT to write or assist with your essay. Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0
• ChatGPT-written essays may include factual inaccuracies, outdated information, and inadequate detail. [3] X Research source Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

You Might Also Like

Thanks for reading our article! If you’d like to learn more about completing school assignments, check out our in-depth interview with Bryce Warwick, JD .

• ↑ https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6783457-what-is-chatgpt
• ↑ https://platform.openai.com/examples/default-essay-outline
• ↑ https://www.ipl.org/div/chatgpt/

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How to Write an Essay Using AI

Artificial intelligence has progressed to the point where AI tools can now assist with writing everything from essays and articles to books. AI writing assistants act as an editor, wordsmith or even creator to help students, academics, bloggers and authors produce better quality content with greater efficiency.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll overview everything you need to know to get started writing essays with AI including:

• How AI essay writing assistants work
• The top apps and sites providing AI writing help
• What types of essay writing they can help with
• Templates and examples for getting started
• Capabilities and limitations to be aware of
• Tips to incorporate AI writing effectively in your workflow

Let’s dive in to harnessing this transformative technology for your next essay!

How Does AI Help With Writing Essays?

AI applications approach essay writing assistance in a few key ways:

• Brainstorming - AI can provide relevant ideas, concepts, perspectives and arguments around a topic to include as evidence.
• Outlining - The best tools create organized essay outlines ensuring logical flow and structure.
• Drafting - Apps can generate complete multi-paragraph drafts on a topic which writers can then edit.
• Editing - Most offer grammar, spelling, style and even depth of analysis checks to improve drafts.
• Paraphrasing - This helps rewrite existing text or source information in your own words.
• Citing sources - Some apps automatically cite sources and generate bibliographies properly formatted.

The level of actual writing versus enhancing human writing varies across solutions, so research thoroughly to find your best match.

Top 5 AI Essay Writing Assistants

After evaluating dozens of writing apps, these 5 provide the best results for essay creation specifically:

Just Think AI

An AI chat with A Human Touch . Enhance your productivity with Just Think Chat, a user-friendly AI chatbot. Overcome writers block, generate ideas, revise content, or get answer effortlessly.

Article Forge

Article Forge has a strong academic focus, with an Essay mode specifically for crafting logical arguments and persuasive essays filled with cited facts. Ideal for research paper help.

Rytr boasts specialized intelligence for writing clear, compelling arguments in blogs, essays and more. It asks probing questions then incorporates your answers into drafts.

INK Associate

INK Associate enhances your writing productivity by suggesting ways to improve clarity, concision and comprehension. Great for proofreading and editing.

GPT-3 Essay Writer

Tools harnessing OpenAI's GPT-3 like Essay Writer create remarkably human-like essays. Requires more guidance to stay on-topic.

Essay Types AI Can Assist With

Some apps are specialized for specific types of essays required in academia and standardized testing. Here are key genres supported:

Argumentative Essays

Arguing a position with logic and evidence cited. Tools help craft sound premises, counterarguments and impactful conclusions.

Persuasive Essays

Similar to argumentative but specifically aimed at swaying the reader regarding policies, interpretations, theories or actions.

Compare and Contrast

Analyzing the similarities and differences between concepts, works or phenomena. Tools ensure clear links are made.

Research Papers

Long form essays synthesizing research around a thesis. AI helps format like academic papers with citations and bibliographies.

Narrative Essays

Telling an entertaining or impactful personal story. Apps assist with structures that emotionally resonate with readers.

Scholarship Essays

Presenting your background, accomplishments and goals in the best possible light. AI ensures relevance to prompt.

Essay Writing Templates and Examples

When first utilizing an AI writing assistant, it's helpful to have templates and examples to base your prompt off.

Here are prompts for common academic essay types you can customize:

Argumentative Essay

Topic: {Topic to argue}

Length: {Word count}

Words Style: Academic argumentative essay

Arguments for: {2-3 strongest arguments}

Arguments against: {The main counterargument}

Conclusion: {Your position} is the better policy because {reasons}.

For example:

Topic: All students should be required to learn coding Length: 800 words Style: Academic argumentative essay Arguments for: Coding teaches logical thinking, prepares for most careers, provides problem solving skills Arguments against: Adds additional schoolwork burden, benefits small subset of students   Conclusion: Mandatory coding classes are the better policy because the skills help nearly all future career paths.

Persuasive Essay

Audience: {Teacher, peer students, university alumni, etc} Thesis: Convince the audience that {position, interpretation, action} is {superior, correct, moral, just, etc} because {2-3 strongest reasons}

Supporting evidence: {facts, expert opinions, personal anecdotes} Counterarguments to address: {The main opposition position}

Style: {Formal or casual} persuasive essay

Audience: School principal Thesis: Convince the principal that allowing cell phones in class is the better policy because it enables learning tech skills, accessing information, and improved safety. Supporting evidence: Studies show benefits, students can film dangerous behaviors Counterarguments: It enables distractions, cheating and unwanted sharing Style: Semi-formal persuasive essay

Capabilities and Limitations of AI Essay Help

Understanding what essay writing AI can and cannot yet do will lead to the most successful experience:

Capabilities:

• Analyze prompts and determine optimal content and structure
• Generate complete drafts with readable flow and style
• Check spelling, grammar, and catch insensitive phrasing
• Format citations and bibliographies for academic integrity
• Develop arguments backed by evidence and reasoning

Limitations:

• Cannot deeply understand nuanced contexts and sentiments
• Struggles evaluating logical consistencies and factual accuracy
• Limited ability checking overall coherence and impact
• Does not build long-term memory, concepts and wisdom
• Cannot object in any way or cease participation

Use AI as a production assistant rather than independent author until the technology matures further in key reasoning areas in the coming years.

Tips for Using AI Effectively To Write Essays

To leverage these amazing tools most effectively and ethically, we recommend:

• Curate source materials - Feed the AI relevant, factual sources representing diverse perspectives.
• Outline the draft first - Guide arguments and structure before having AI compose full paragraphs and sentences.
• Check accuracy - Ensure factual truth and logical reasoning in arguments made.
• Maintain authorship - Edit, rearrange and rewrite elements in your own voice and style.
• Let the tool inspire new directions and arguments you may not have considered.
• Enjoy the productivity boost these tools offer our constrained time and minds!

We hope this guide has been helpful in getting started with AI assistants for leveling up your essay writing across school, work and passion projects!

AI EduPathways

On ‘Strawberry,’ Reasoning, and Intuition

The launch of openai's new reasoning-based models shakes the market.

The AI community is abuzz this week surrounding the launch of OpenAI’s new reasoning-based artificial intelligence model ‘Strawberry.’

The model is designed to “think through” options and planning procedures before providing a response. The idea is to produce a model that performs better on tasks that require planning. It also appears to succeed at explaining its own “thinking” process in ways that are eye-opening and different than previous models.

As an English teacher, I do not feel equipped to provide an analysis of the model itself. As such, I’d like to share information from researchers and thinkers that I trust. If you are looking for a more thorough breakdown, I would recommend the following:

Ethan Mollick - Something New: On OpenAI’s Strawberry Launch

Benjamin Riley: The new version of ChatGPT might be a big deal

Nick Potkalitsky’s LinkedIn Post

But, the news of this launch also reminded me of a profile of the “Godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, last November in The New Yorker.

At the time that I first read it, I was just diving into AI and the article proved to be formative for my own perceptions and ideas around what the advancement of this technology meant for me and my students. If you have not read it and have access to The New Yorker, I highly recommend it.

I’d like to share a paragraph from the article that I felt was poignant and relevant. Pay close attention to Hinton’s final comment:

How should we describe the mental life of a digital intelligence without a mortal body or an individual identity? In recent months, some A.I. researchers have taken to calling GPT a “reasoning engine”—a way, perhaps, of sliding out from under the weight of the word “thinking,” which we struggle to define. “People blame us for using those words—‘thinking,’ ‘knowing,’ ‘understanding,’ ‘deciding,’ and so on,” Bengio told me. “But even though we don’t have a complete understanding of the meaning of those words, they’ve been very powerful ways of creating analogies that help us understand what we’re doing. It’s helped us a lot to talk about ‘imagination,’ ‘attention,’ ‘planning,’ ‘intuition’ as a tool to clarify and explore.” In Bengio’s view, “a lot of what we’ve been doing is solving the ‘intuition’ aspect of the mind.” Intuitions might be understood as thoughts that we can’t explain: our minds generate them for us, unconsciously, by making connections between what we’re encountering in the present and our past experiences. We tend to prize reason over intuition, but Hinton believes that we are more intuitive than we acknowledge. “For years, symbolic-A.I. people said our true nature is, we’re reasoning machines,” he told me. “I think that’s just nonsense. Our true nature is, we’re analogy machines, with a little bit of reasoning built on top, to notice when the analogies are giving us the wrong answers, and correct them.”

I love analogies and have used them heavily in my arguments in favor of the concept of anthropomorphizing AI , which means approaching and interacting with it more like it is a human than a technology.

I have received both support and pushback on this stance, but I believe it is an effective tactic for the same reasons stated above by Bengio and Hinton. It leans on analogies that the average person can understand - like ‘Stranger Danger.’ 

However, Yale Researcher Luciano Floridi wrote a research paper detailing the risks of engaging in “conceptual borrowing, ” a phrase that essentially means using analogies to connect one discipline to another. That paper strikes a cautious tone with regard to over-use of analogies, but then ends on an optimistic note that subtly supports my own beliefs and approach.

In the context of ‘Strawberry’ though, my initial instinct is worry – not only because we are once again experiencing a possible leap in technological capabilities for which we are not cognitively prepared – but also because this shift to an emphasis on ‘reasoning’ takes the technology away from how our brains actually work, according to Hinton.

In The Singularity is Nearer , author Ray Kurzweil goes to great pains to emphasize the importance of analogies in our cognitive processes and subsequent advancements in knowledge and intelligence. Charles Darwin, he notes, stumbled onto The Theory of Evolution from an analogy to geology.

Specifically, he leaned on the conclusions of Scottish geologist Charles Lyell, who argued that canyons were not God-given creations - as was the prevailing view at the time - but were created by rivers that appeared first and slowly impacted the rock into its subsequent formation.

“[Darwin] took Lyell’s concept of the significance of a river eroding one small grain of stone at a time and applied it to one small genetic change over a generation…defending his theory with an explicit analogy,” Kurzweil writes.

In The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote, “As modern geology has almost banished such views as the excavation of a great valley by a single diluvial wave, so will natural selection, if it be a true principle, banish the belief of the continued creation of new organic beings, or of any great and sudden modification of their structure.”

These points emphasize the value of our intuition and the use of analogies. They lead me to wonder if our collective love of reasoning and logic actually betrays a deeper truth that both Kurzweil and Hinton seek to describe; That’s not actually how our brains work. 

The question is, Do we want — or need — a reasoning machine?

Before I leave, I’ll provide one anecdotal example that drives towards an optimistic note. When I sit down to write an essay, I rarely engage in a reason-based planning process. Some people like to outline, but I find that outlining often hamstrings the creative process. The logic gets in the way. Utilizing logic first, I might develop a better flow of ideas in my first draft, but I will never get to the deepest truth, which is of utmost importance to me.

Instead, I sit down and intuitively lay down my thoughts on the page. If my ideas are good enough, they tend to connect to one another without running into too many logical snafus. If they are not good ideas, they run into quite a few of these traps, sometimes leading to my decision to abandon the idea. My logical review of the intuitive creation sometimes highlights enough gaps to call the intuition into question, but only after the fact.

This mirrors the process that Hinton describes in his quote. Said differently, analogies help us build, logic helps us trim down. 

As a result, there might be reason for great optimism as it pertains to ‘Strawberry.’ A better logic machine might free us up to engage in deeper, more intuitive, creative work, subsequently acting as the “logic trimmer” on our quest for the deepest truths. 

What do you think?

Discussion about this post

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5 ways ChatGPT can help you write an essay

ChatGPT  is capable of doing many different things very well. One of the biggest standout features is its ability to compose all sorts of text within seconds, including songs, poems, bedtime stories, and  essays . 

The chatbot's writing abilities are not only fun to experiment with but can help provide assistance with everyday tasks. Whether you are a student, a working professional, or just trying to get stuff done, we constantly take time to compose emails, texts, reports, and more. ChatGPT can help you claim some of that time back by helping you brainstorm and even compose any text you need. 

How to use ChatGPT to write: Code | Excel formulas | Resumes  | Cover letters  

Contrary to popular belief, ChatGPT can do much more than write an essay for you from scratch (which would be considered plagiarism). A more useful way to use the chatbot is to have it guide your writing process. 

Below, we show you how to use ChatGPT for both writing and assisting and include some other helpful writing tips. 

How ChatGPT can help you write an essay

If you are looking to use ChatGPT to support or replace your writing, here are five different techniques to explore. 

It is also worth noting before you get started that other AI chatbots can output the same results as ChatGPT or are even better, depending on your needs. For example,  Copilot , Perplexity , and Gemini also have access to the internet and include footnotes linking back to the original source for all of their responses, making the chatbots solid alternatives if you rather skip out on ChatGPT. 

Also:  The best AI chatbots of 2024: ChatGPT and alternatives

Regardless of which AI chatbot you pick, you can use the tips below to get the most out of your prompts and AI assistance.

1. Use ChatGPT to generate essay ideas

Before you start writing an essay, you need to flesh out the idea. When professors assign essays, they generally give students a prompt that gives them leeway for their own self-expression and analysis. 

As a result, students have the task of finding the angle to approach the essay on their own. If you have written an essay recently, you know that finding the angle is often the trickiest part -- and this is where ChatGPT can help. 

Also: How do AI checkers actually work?

All you need to do is input the assignment topic, include as much detail as you'd like -- such as what you're thinking about covering -- and let ChatGPT do the rest. For example, based on a paper prompt I had in college, I asked:

Can you help me come up with a topic idea for this assignment, "You will write a research paper or case study on a leadership topic of your choice." I would like it to include Blake and Mouton's Managerial Leadership Grid and possibly a historical figure. 

Within seconds, the chatbot produced a response that provided me with the title of the essay, options of historical figures on which to focus my article, insight into what information I could include in my paper, and specific examples of a case study I could use. 

2. Use the chatbot to create an outline

Once you have a solid topic, it's time to start brainstorming what you actually want to include in the essay. To facilitate the writing process, I always create an outline, including all the different points I want to touch upon in my essay. However, the outline-writing process is usually tedious. 

With ChatGPT, all you have to do is ask it to write the outline for you. 

Using the topic that ChatGPT helped me generate in step one, I asked the chatbot to write me an outline by saying: 

Can you create an outline for a paper, "Examining the Leadership Style of Abraham Lincoln through Blake and Mouton's Managerial Leadership Grid."

Also: How my 4 favorite AI tools help me get more done at work

After a few seconds, the chatbot produced a holistic outline divided into seven sections, with three points under each section. 

This outline is thorough and can be condensed for a shorter essay or elaborated on for a longer paper. If you don't like something or want to tweak the outline further, you can do so either manually or with more instructions to ChatGPT. 

If you want ChatGPT to include links and sources throughout, you can ask it to and it will regenerate the answer using its web-browsing feature , further expediting your essay-writing process. 

3. Use ChatGPT to find sources

Now that you know exactly what you want to write, it's time to find reputable sources for your information. If you don't know where to start, you can ask ChatGPT.

All you need to do is ask the AI to find sources for your essay topic. The biggest thing to remember is to include the type of source you want, whether it be web pages, books, PDFs, research, papers, etc. 

Also:   How to make ChatGPT provide sources and citations

The specifics are necessary because when you specify web pages, ChatGPT will activate the web browsing feature and include web links in its article. If you use a very general prompt, however, it will likely default to generating its answer from its database, which isn't up to date. 

For example, I asked the following: 

"Examining the Leadership Style of Abraham Lincoln through Blake and Mouton's Managerial Leadership Grid."

The chatbot outputs links, accessible right at the top of the answer under the drop-down that says "Searched # of sites." Then, within the response, it will answer your prompt conversationally, also including sources with site names and links in parathesis. 

4. Use ChatGPT to write an essay

It is worth noting that if you take the text directly from the chatbot and submit it, your work could be considered plagiarism since it is not your original work. As with any information taken from another source, text generated by an AI should be identified and credited to the chatbot in your work.

In most educational institutions, the penalties for plagiarism are severe, ranging from a failing grade to expulsion from the school. A better use of ChatGPT's writing features would be to create a sample essay to guide your writing. 

Also:  ChatGPT vs. Microsoft Copilot vs. Gemini: Which is the best AI chatbot?

If you still want ChatGPT to create an essay from scratch, enter the topic and the desired length. For example, I input the following text: 

Can you write a five-paragraph essay on the topic, "Examining the Leadership Style of Abraham Lincoln through Blake and Mouton's Managerial Leadership Grid."

Within seconds, the chatbot gave the exact output I required: a coherent, five-paragraph essay on the topic. You could then use that text to guide your own writing. 

At this point, it's worth remembering how tools like ChatGPT work : they put words together in a form that they think is statistically valid, but they don't know if what they are saying is true or accurate. 

As a result, the output you receive might include invented facts, details, or other oddities. The output might be a useful starting point for your own work but don't expect it to be entirely accurate, and always double-check the content. 

5. Use ChatGPT to co-edit your essay

Once you've written your own essay, you can use ChatGPT's advanced writing capabilities to edit the piece for you. 

You can simply tell the chatbot what you want it to edit. For example, I asked ChatGPT to edit our five-paragraph essay for structure and grammar, but other options could have included flow, tone, and more. 

Also:  How to use ChatGPT to make charts and tables

Once you ask the tool to edit your essay, it will prompt you to paste your text into the chatbot. ChatGPT will then output your essay with corrections made. This feature is particularly useful because ChatGPT edits your essay more thoroughly than a basic proofreading tool, as it goes beyond simply checking spelling. 

You can also co-edit with the chatbot, asking it to review a specific paragraph or sentence and rewrite or fix the text for clarity. Personally, I find this feature very helpful. 

6 ways to write better ChatGPT prompts - and get the results you want faster

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ChatGPT prompting 101

ChatGPT can be a great study assistant, but the responses you get are only as good as the input you provide. Keep these four tips in mind to craft great ChatGPT prompts :

• Give ChatGPT a role to play
• Be precise and provide context
• Test and improve your prompts

ChatGPT prompts

100% ethical ChatGPT prompts

Write a research question

• Generate three possible research questions for an argumentative high school essay on the following topic: “The long-term impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Brainstorm topic ideas

• Generate 10 questions to help me brainstorm topics for my college admission essay.

Quiz yourself

• I’m learning about [ insert topic here ]. Please create a practice test with 4 multiple-choice questions, each with 4 possible answers and solutions (show the solutions separately under the multiple-choice test).

Learn by metaphors and stories

• I ‘m learning about [ insert topic here ]. Convert the key lessons from this topic into engaging stories and metaphors to aid my memorization.

Find limitations

• What are some common limitations or critiques of research in the field of [ insert topic here ]?

Learn about a topic

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• 09 December 2022

AI bot ChatGPT writes smart essays — should professors worry?

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Between overwork, underpayment and the pressure to publish, academics have plenty to worry about. Now there’s a fresh concern: ChatGPT , an artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbot that creates surprisingly intelligent-sounding text in response to user prompts, including homework assignments and exam-style questions. The replies are so lucid, well-researched and decently referenced that some academics are calling the bot the death knell for conventional forms of educational assessment. How worried should professors and lecturers be?

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The College Essay Is Dead

Nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia.

Suppose you are a professor of pedagogy, and you assign an essay on learning styles. A student hands in an essay with the following opening paragraph:

The construct of “learning styles” is problematic because it fails to account for the processes through which learning styles are shaped. Some students might develop a particular learning style because they have had particular experiences. Others might develop a particular learning style by trying to accommodate to a learning environment that was not well suited to their learning needs. Ultimately, we need to understand the interactions among learning styles and environmental and personal factors, and how these shape how we learn and the kinds of learning we experience.

Pass or fail? A- or B+? And how would your grade change if you knew a human student hadn’t written it at all? Because Mike Sharples, a professor in the U.K., used GPT-3, a large language model from OpenAI that automatically generates text from a prompt, to write it. (The whole essay, which Sharples considered graduate-level, is available, complete with references, here .) Personally, I lean toward a B+. The passage reads like filler, but so do most student essays.

Sharples’s intent was to urge educators to “rethink teaching and assessment” in light of the technology, which he said “could become a gift for student cheats, or a powerful teaching assistant, or a tool for creativity.” Essay generation is neither theoretical nor futuristic at this point. In May, a student in New Zealand confessed to using AI to write their papers, justifying it as a tool like Grammarly or spell-check: ​​“I have the knowledge, I have the lived experience, I’m a good student, I go to all the tutorials and I go to all the lectures and I read everything we have to read but I kind of felt I was being penalised because I don’t write eloquently and I didn’t feel that was right,” they told a student paper in Christchurch. They don’t feel like they’re cheating, because the student guidelines at their university state only that you’re not allowed to get somebody else to do your work for you. GPT-3 isn’t “somebody else”—it’s a program.

The world of generative AI is progressing furiously. Last week, OpenAI released an advanced chatbot named ChatGPT that has spawned a new wave of marveling and hand-wringing , plus an upgrade to GPT-3 that allows for complex rhyming poetry; Google previewed new applications last month that will allow people to describe concepts in text and see them rendered as images; and the creative-AI firm Jasper received a $1.5 billion valuation in October. It still takes a little initiative for a kid to find a text generator, but not for long.

The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up. Kevin Bryan, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, tweeted in astonishment about OpenAI’s new chatbot last week: “You can no longer give take-home exams/homework … Even on specific questions that involve combining knowledge across domains, the OpenAI chat is frankly better than the average MBA at this point. It is frankly amazing.” Neither the engineers building the linguistic tech nor the educators who will encounter the resulting language are prepared for the fallout.

A chasm has existed between humanists and technologists for a long time. In the 1950s, C. P. Snow gave his famous lecture, later the essay “The Two Cultures,” describing the humanistic and scientific communities as tribes losing contact with each other. “Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists,” Snow wrote. “Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other.” Snow’s argument was a plea for a kind of intellectual cosmopolitanism: Literary people were missing the essential insights of the laws of thermodynamics, and scientific people were ignoring the glories of Shakespeare and Dickens.

The rupture that Snow identified has only deepened. In the modern tech world, the value of a humanistic education shows up in evidence of its absence. Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the crypto exchange FTX who recently lost his $16 billion fortune in a few days , is a famously proud illiterate. “I would never read a book,” he once told an interviewer . “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.” Elon Musk and Twitter are another excellent case in point. It’s painful and extraordinary to watch the ham-fisted way a brilliant engineering mind like Musk deals with even relatively simple literary concepts such as parody and satire. He obviously has never thought about them before. He probably didn’t imagine there was much to think about.

The extraordinary ignorance on questions of society and history displayed by the men and women reshaping society and history has been the defining feature of the social-media era. Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg has read a great deal about Caesar Augustus , but I wish he’d read about the regulation of the pamphlet press in 17th-century Europe. It might have spared America the annihilation of social trust .

These failures don’t derive from mean-spiritedness or even greed, but from a willful obliviousness. The engineers do not recognize that humanistic questions—like, say, hermeneutics or the historical contingency of freedom of speech or the genealogy of morality—are real questions with real consequences. Everybody is entitled to their opinion about politics and culture, it’s true, but an opinion is different from a grounded understanding. The most direct path to catastrophe is to treat complex problems as if they’re obvious to everyone. You can lose billions of dollars pretty quickly that way.

As the technologists have ignored humanistic questions to their peril, the humanists have greeted the technological revolutions of the past 50 years by committing soft suicide. As of 2017, the number of English majors had nearly halved since the 1990s. History enrollments have declined by 45 percent since 2007 alone. Needless to say, humanists’ understanding of technology is partial at best. The state of digital humanities is always several categories of obsolescence behind, which is inevitable. (Nobody expects them to teach via Instagram Stories.) But more crucially, the humanities have not fundamentally changed their approach in decades, despite technology altering the entire world around them. They are still exploding meta-narratives like it’s 1979, an exercise in self-defeat.

Read: The humanities are in crisis

Contemporary academia engages, more or less permanently, in self-critique on any and every front it can imagine. In a tech-centered world, language matters, voice and style matter, the study of eloquence matters, history matters, ethical systems matter. But the situation requires humanists to explain why they matter, not constantly undermine their own intellectual foundations. The humanities promise students a journey to an irrelevant, self-consuming future; then they wonder why their enrollments are collapsing. Is it any surprise that nearly half of humanities graduates regret their choice of major ?

The case for the value of humanities in a technologically determined world has been made before. Steve Jobs always credited a significant part of Apple’s success to his time as a dropout hanger-on at Reed College, where he fooled around with Shakespeare and modern dance, along with the famous calligraphy class that provided the aesthetic basis for the Mac’s design. “A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem,” Jobs said . “The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” Apple is a humanistic tech company. It’s also the largest company in the world.

Despite the clear value of a humanistic education, its decline continues. Over the past 10 years, STEM has triumphed, and the humanities have collapsed . The number of students enrolled in computer science is now nearly the same as the number of students enrolled in all of the humanities combined.

And now there’s GPT-3. Natural-language processing presents the academic humanities with a whole series of unprecedented problems. Practical matters are at stake: Humanities departments judge their undergraduate students on the basis of their essays. They give Ph.D.s on the basis of a dissertation’s composition. What happens when both processes can be significantly automated? Going by my experience as a former Shakespeare professor, I figure it will take 10 years for academia to face this new reality: two years for the students to figure out the tech, three more years for the professors to recognize that students are using the tech, and then five years for university administrators to decide what, if anything, to do about it. Teachers are already some of the most overworked, underpaid people in the world. They are already dealing with a humanities in crisis. And now this. I feel for them.

And yet, despite the drastic divide of the moment, natural-language processing is going to force engineers and humanists together. They are going to need each other despite everything. Computer scientists will require basic, systematic education in general humanism: The philosophy of language, sociology, history, and ethics are not amusing questions of theoretical speculation anymore. They will be essential in determining the ethical and creative use of chatbots, to take only an obvious example.

The humanists will need to understand natural-language processing because it’s the future of language, but also because there is more than just the possibility of disruption here. Natural-language processing can throw light on a huge number of scholarly problems. It is going to clarify matters of attribution and literary dating that no system ever devised will approach; the parameters in large language models are much more sophisticated than the current systems used to determine which plays Shakespeare wrote, for example . It may even allow for certain types of restorations, filling the gaps in damaged texts by means of text-prediction models. It will reformulate questions of literary style and philology; if you can teach a machine to write like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that machine must be able to inform you, in some way, about how Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote.

The connection between humanism and technology will require people and institutions with a breadth of vision and a commitment to interests that transcend their field. Before that space for collaboration can exist, both sides will have to take the most difficult leaps for highly educated people: Understand that they need the other side, and admit their basic ignorance. But that’s always been the beginning of wisdom, no matter what technological era we happen to inhabit.

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You are sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire, on a cold winter’s night. Perhaps you have a mug of tea in hand, perhaps something stronger. You open a magazine to an article you’ve been meaning to read. The title suggested a story about a promising — but also potentially dangerous — new technology on the cusp of becoming mainstream, and after reading only a few sentences, you find yourself pulled into the story. A revolution is coming in machine intelligence, the author argues, and we need, as a society, to get better at anticipating its consequences. But then the strangest thing happens: You notice that the writer has, seemingly deliberately, omitted the very last word of the first .

The missing word jumps into your consciousness almost unbidden: ‘‘the very last word of the first paragraph.’’ There’s no sense of an internal search query in your mind; the word ‘‘paragraph’’ just pops out. It might seem like second nature, this filling-in-the-blank exercise, but doing it makes you think of the embedded layers of knowledge behind the thought. You need a command of the spelling and syntactic patterns of English; you need to understand not just the dictionary definitions of words but also the ways they relate to one another; you have to be familiar enough with the high standards of magazine publishing to assume that the missing word is not just a typo, and that editors are generally loath to omit key words in published pieces unless the author is trying to be clever — perhaps trying to use the missing word to make a point about your cleverness, how swiftly a human speaker of English can conjure just the right word.

Siri and Alexa popularized the experience of conversing with machines, but this was on the next level, approaching a fluency that resembled science fiction.

Before you can pursue that idea further, you’re back into the article, where you find the author has taken you to a building complex in suburban Iowa. Inside one of the buildings lies a wonder of modern technology: 285,000 CPU cores yoked together into one giant supercomputer, powered by solar arrays and cooled by industrial fans. The machines never sleep: Every second of every day, they churn through innumerable calculations, using state-of-the-art techniques in machine intelligence that go by names like ‘‘stochastic gradient descent’’ and ‘‘convolutional neural networks.’’ The whole system is believed to be one of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet.

And what, you may ask, is this computational dynamo doing with all these prodigious resources? Mostly, it is playing a kind of game, over and over again, billions of times a second. And the game is called: Guess what the missing word is.

The supercomputer complex in Iowa is running a program created by OpenAI, an organization established in late 2015 by a handful of Silicon Valley luminaries, including Elon Musk; Greg Brockman, who until recently had been chief technology officer of the e-payment juggernaut Stripe; and Sam Altman, at the time the president of the start-up incubator Y Combinator. In its first few years, as it built up its programming brain trust, OpenAI’s technical achievements were mostly overshadowed by the star power of its founders. But that changed in summer 2020, when OpenAI began offering limited access to a new program called Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3, colloquially referred to as GPT-3. Though the platform was initially available to only a small handful of developers, examples of GPT-3’s uncanny prowess with language — and at least the illusion of cognition — began to circulate across the web and through social media. Siri and Alexa had popularized the experience of conversing with machines, but this was on the next level, approaching a fluency that resembled creations from science fiction like HAL 9000 from “2001”: a computer program that can answer open-ended complex questions in perfectly composed sentences.

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AI for Essay Writing — Exploring Top 10 Essay Writers

Table of Contents

Let’s admit it — essay writing is quite a challenging task for students. Especially with the stringent deadlines, conducting research, writing , editing, and addressing to-and-fro reviews — consumes a whole lot of time and often becomes stressful. Therefore, students are always on the lookout for tools that speed up the essay writing process.

And that’s when AI writing tools make their debut! Using the best AI for essay writing makes the lives of students much easier by automatically generating the essay for them.

The rise in the popularity of artificial intelligence technology and deep learning has paved the way for the numerous AI writer tools available today. To help you understand the different types of AI tools and their benefits, we’ve uncovered the features of the top 10 AI essay generators in this article.

Let’s explore the tools and learn how they are transforming the tedious task of essay writing!

What is essay writing?

Essay writing is a part of academic writing that emphasizes formulating an idea or argument. The main objective of academic essay writing is to present a well-reasoned argument or idea. Evidence, analysis, and interpretation are the three major components of essay writing . It should have a logical structure to support the argument or idea of the essay so that it communicates clearly and concisely.

What is an AI essay writer?

AI essay writers is a tool that is designed to help students generate essays using machine learning techniques. They can be used to generate a full essay or generate a few parts of the essay, for example, essay titles, introduction, conclusion, etc.

Why should researchers use AI essay generators?

There are infinite benefits to using AI tools for writing unique essays, especially for researchers or students. Here are a few of them —

1. Saves time

Using best AI for essay writing has its own benefits. Students can take care of the research process while these AI tools write the essays for them. Be it an essay topic or a full-length essay generation, it saves a bunch of students' time.

2. Boosts productivity

Writing is a tedious task especially when you want to write an essay about a novel topic, that writer’s block starts haunting and your productivity gets affected. But, with AI, it’s the other way around and increases productivity by quickly generating the essays for you.

3. Enhances writing skills — Vocabulary and Style

Adopting the best AI essay writing AI tool not only help with creating essays but also help us hone our writing skills by giving proper suggestions about grammar, sentence structure, tone, style, and word choice.

4. Reduces stress

Students often undergo a lot of pressure and stress because of deadlines and submissions. With the best AI essay generator, they help you write essays smarter thereby reducing stress and fear in no time.

5. Facilitates multidisciplinary research

AI essay writing tools foster interdisciplinary study through their ability to scan and combine knowledge from multiple domains. That way, it helps us quickly get a grasp of new subjects or topics without a heavy-lifting process.

6. Cost-effective

Most of the AI essay writing tools have lower pricing and also allow certain discounts for students. So, it is also a cost-effective approach to use AI writing tools.

The Top AI Essay Writing Tools and Their Features

Several AI essay writers are available based on the types of essays one would want to generate. Now, let's quickly understand the top 10 AI writing tools that generate essays within just a few minutes.

1. PerfectEssayWriter.ai

It is one of the best AI for essay writing that not only creates an essay but also comes up with advanced features including plagiarism detection, auto-referencing, and contextual analysis. As a result, it generates coherent essays that are well-researched and properly cited. It is best recommended for creating academic essays and essay outlines.

How does PerfectEssayWriter work?

• Pick the right tool for your purpose — Go with an essay writer if you want to generate a full essay or choose the essay outliner if you want to create just the outline of the essay.
• Enter your specific conditions and preferences. Add essay topic, academic level, essay type, number of pages, and special instructions, if any.
• Click on “generate” and wait for the result
• Once you have the essay generated, you can review, edit, or refine it and then download it.
• Generates a large chunk of data up to 2000 words
• Output is provided within 90 seconds
• Provides a plethora of other tools like Citation generator, grammar checker, thesis statement generator, and more
• Comes with 10+ essay writing templates
• Subscription-based and not a free tool
• Human review is a mandate

2. Essaybot - Personalized AI writing

Essaybot is the product of a reputed online essay-writing service, MyPerfectWords. It is meant to enhance academic essay writing and streamline the tasks of students. Its user friendly website makes it an instant and hassle-free essay generation saving a lot of time and effort for students.

How does Essaybot work?

• Enter the essay title or topic
• Click on “start writing” and wait for it to generate a well-reasoned essay.
• The tools come for free
• No sign-up is required
• 100% unique and High-quality output
• Very limited features that lack advanced functionalities

3. FreeEssayWriter.net

FreeEssayWriter is an organization that provides essay-writing services to students worldwide. It has an AI essay typer tool — that helps you generate essays instantly. What sets this essay typer apart is its initiative to help students with their free essay writer providing the students with a 2-page free essay.

How does FreeEssayWriter.net work?

It works similarly to Essaybot, input the title or the topic of your essay and wait for it to generate the essay. They also have an option to edit and download a free version of the generated essay instantly.

• Provides high-quality essays and is considered to be one of the reliable and trusted sources of information
• Students can improve their writing skills and learn more about essays by referring to their free essay database or sources
• Priority customer support is available 24*7
• The site is not optimized for mobile devices
• The quality of the essay output could still be improved

4. MyEssayWriter

This AI essay writing tool is no exception in terms of generating a high-quality essay. You can generate essays for various topics depending on the background of your research study. Be it academic or non-academic essay writing, this tool comes in handy.

How does MyEssay Writer work?

Add your preferences and then click on generate. It will give you a high-quality and 100% unique essay crafted based on your requirements.

• The tool comes for free — no subscription is required
• Knows for its consistency in the quality and the tone of the essay output
• Also has a paid custom writing service that provides human-written essays
• Might not provide quality output for complex and technical-based keywords or topic

5. College Essay AI

College essay AI stands unique as an ai writing tool as it not only uses an AI-based algorithm to generate essays but it also backs up the output as it is reviewed and approved by a team of professional experts. It is the best AI essay writing tool for college and graduate students where the output adheres to the graduate students' essay writing guidelines.

How does the College Essay AI generator work?

• Input the required information — essay topic, academic level, number of pages, sources, and specific instructions, if any.
• Click on “generate essay” and wait for the output
• Conduct plagiarism and grammar check
• Download the essay
• High-level output for academic essay writing
• Pocket-friendly premium plans
• Doesn’t provide multiple sets of templates
• Not quite suitable for non-academic essay writing

6. Jasper AI

Jasper AI has been the oldest player in the game of AI content writing. Fast forward to now, its features have been magnified with the inception of natural language processing algorithms and that’s how they are helping students write their essays as well. However, Jasper is the best AI tool for non-academic writing projects like content writing or creative writing.

How does Jasper AI work?

• Choose a template — if you are about to write an essay, go with the “document”
• Add your preferences
• Click “compose” and get the output
• Generates the essays instantly
• Provides well-structured output according to the tone and style of your preferences
• Not quite suitable for academic writing essays

7. Textero AI

Textero AI provides a few writing tools for students that facilitate their various academic papers and writing projects. Its essay generator helps you generate ideas for a full-length essay based on the topic and also suggests new topic ideas or thesis statement ideas for your academic assignments.

How does Textero AI work?

• Click on “Essay Generator” located on the LHS (Left-hand Side)
• Input the title and description based on which you want to generate the essay
• Pick the right citation style
• Click “generate” and wait for the output
• It also provides other tools like an outline generator, and summary generator and has an AI research assistant that answers all your questions relevant to the research
• The output is 100% unique and plagiarism and error-free
• Might fail to provide an essay focussed on complex or technical topics

8. Quillbot

Though Quillbot is essentially built for paraphrasing and summarizing tasks. It comes as a rescue when you have to revamp, improvise, or refine your already-composed essay. Its co-writer helps you transform your thoughts and ideas and make them more coherent by rephrasing them. You can easily customize your text based on the customization options available.

How does Quillbot Paraphraser work?

• Import or copy the content
• Click on “Paraphrase” “Summarize” or “Suggest text” based on your requirement
• Make the required customizations and save the document.
• Offers a plethora of tools required for students
• Both free and premium plans are available
• Enhances vocabulary and language skills
• Limited customization options with the free plan
• Only supports the English language

9. SciSpace Paraphraser

SciSpace is the best AI tool that helps you fine-tune your essay. If you feel your essay writing needs AI suggestions to improve the language, vocabulary, writing styles, and tone of your essay, SciSpace is at your rescue. It has more customized options than Quillbot and improves your essay by rephrasing it according to the required or preferred writing style, and tone. This is a very good alternative to Quillbot.

How does SciSpace Paraphrasing work?

• Simply paste the content to the screen
• Choose the length and variation properly
• Select the language
• Click “Paraphrase”
• Has 22 custom tones and all of them are available even on the free plan
• Supports 75+ languages
• Comes with an AI-detection report for English paraphrase output
• Delay in the output

10. ChatGPT

It would be unfair if we talk about AI tools and do not enlist ChatGPT. When it comes to automated essay writing tasks, ChatGPT is not trivial. With proper prompts, you can automate the essay writing process and generate a well-crafted and coherent essay. However, the quality and the accuracy cannot be trusted as the model hallucinates and doesn’t include sources.

How does ChatGPT work?

• Create a prompt based on your requirement
• Ask ChatGPT to write an essay about your topic, specify conditions and preferences
• Click enter and wait for the essay
• Comes for free
• Cannot rely on the output as the model hallucinates
• Lacks the upgraded features that other essay-writing tools have

Concluding!

Writing essays can be a real struggle. But, the inception of the best AI essay-generation tools makes the entire writing process a lot easier and smoother. However, you should be extra vigilant while relying on these tools and consciously use them only as a technological aid. Because over-reliance on these AI tools could diminish student's writing skills and the user can become more gripped by the tools. So, use it wisely without affecting your knowledge and skills.

You can explore the above tools whenever you need any help with essay writing, and reap the benefits of them without compromising on the quality of your writing.

And! If you're stuck exploring multiple research papers or want to conduct a comprehensive literature review , you know which tool to use? Yes, it's SciSpace Literature Review, our AI-powered workspace, which is meant to make your research workflow easier. Plus, it also comes with SciSpace Copilot , our AI research assistant that answers any question that you may have about the research paper.

If you haven't used it yet, you can use it here !

Choosing the best AI for writing long-form essays depends on your requirements. Here are the top 5 tools that help you create long-form and college essays —

1. Free Essay Writer AI

2. College Essay AI

3. My Essay Writer

4. Textero AI

5. Perfect Essay Writer

The Perfect Essay Writer AI and Textero AI are the two best AI essay generators that help you write the best essays.

ChatGPT is not specifically built to assist you with essay writing, however, you can use the tool to create college essays and long-form essays. It’s important to review, fact-check the essay, and refer to the sources properly.

Essaybot is a free AI essay generator tool that helps you create a well-reasoned essay with just a click.

Unless your university permits it, using AI essay generators or writing tools to write your essay can be considered as plagiarism.

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Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art

In 1953, Roald Dahl published “ The Great Automatic Grammatizator ,” a short story about an electrical engineer who secretly desires to be a writer. One day, after completing construction of the world’s fastest calculating machine, the engineer realizes that “English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness.” He constructs a fiction-writing machine that can produce a five-thousand-word short story in thirty seconds; a novel takes fifteen minutes and requires the operator to manipulate handles and foot pedals, as if he were driving a car or playing an organ, to regulate the levels of humor and pathos. The resulting novels are so popular that, within a year, half the fiction published in English is a product of the engineer’s invention.

Is there anything about art that makes us think it can’t be created by pushing a button, as in Dahl’s imagination? Right now, the fiction generated by large language models like ChatGPT is terrible, but one can imagine that such programs might improve in the future. How good could they get? Could they get better than humans at writing fiction—or making paintings or movies—in the same way that calculators are better at addition and subtraction?

Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.

If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making. There are various ways it can do this. One is to take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland. Another is to instruct the program to engage in style mimicry, emulating the choices made by a specific writer, which produces a highly derivative story. In neither case is it creating interesting art.

I think the same underlying principle applies to visual art, although it’s harder to quantify the choices that a painter might make. Real paintings bear the mark of an enormous number of decisions. By comparison, a person using a text-to-image program like DALL-E enters a prompt such as “A knight in a suit of armor fights a fire-breathing dragon,” and lets the program do the rest. (The newest version of DALL-E accepts prompts of up to four thousand characters—hundreds of words, but not enough to describe every detail of a scene.) Most of the choices in the resulting image have to be borrowed from similar paintings found online; the image might be exquisitely rendered, but the person entering the prompt can’t claim credit for that.

Some commentators imagine that image generators will affect visual culture as much as the advent of photography once did. Although this might seem superficially plausible, the idea that photography is similar to generative A.I. deserves closer examination. When photography was first developed, I suspect it didn’t seem like an artistic medium because it wasn’t apparent that there were a lot of choices to be made; you just set up the camera and start the exposure. But over time people realized that there were a vast number of things you could do with cameras, and the artistry lies in the many choices that a photographer makes. It might not always be easy to articulate what the choices are, but when you compare an amateur’s photos to a professional’s, you can see the difference. So then the question becomes: Is there a similar opportunity to make a vast number of choices using a text-to-image generator? I think the answer is no. An artist—whether working digitally or with paint—implicitly makes far more decisions during the process of making a painting than would fit into a text prompt of a few hundred words.

We can imagine a text-to-image generator that, over the course of many sessions, lets you enter tens of thousands of words into its text box to enable extremely fine-grained control over the image you’re producing; this would be something analogous to Photoshop with a purely textual interface. I’d say that a person could use such a program and still deserve to be called an artist. The film director Bennett Miller has used DALL-E 2 to generate some very striking images that have been exhibited at the Gagosian gallery; to create them, he crafted detailed text prompts and then instructed DALL-E to revise and manipulate the generated images again and again. He generated more than a hundred thousand images to arrive at the twenty images in the exhibit. But he has said that he hasn’t been able to obtain comparable results on later releases of DALL-E . I suspect this might be because Miller was using DALL-E for something it’s not intended to do; it’s as if he hacked Microsoft Paint to make it behave like Photoshop, but as soon as a new version of Paint was released, his hacks stopped working. OpenAI probably isn’t trying to build a product to serve users like Miller, because a product that requires a user to work for months to create an image isn’t appealing to a wide audience. The company wants to offer a product that generates images with little effort.

It’s harder to imagine a program that, over many sessions, helps you write a good novel. This hypothetical writing program might require you to enter a hundred thousand words of prompts in order for it to generate an entirely different hundred thousand words that make up the novel you’re envisioning. It’s not clear to me what such a program would look like. Theoretically, if such a program existed, the user could perhaps deserve to be called the author. But, again, I don’t think companies like OpenAI want to create versions of ChatGPT that require just as much effort from users as writing a novel from scratch. The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.

The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate “large-scale” with “important” when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.

Believing that inspiration outweighs everything else is, I suspect, a sign that someone is unfamiliar with the medium. I contend that this is true even if one’s goal is to create entertainment rather than high art. People often underestimate the effort required to entertain; a thriller novel may not live up to Kafka’s ideal of a book—an “axe for the frozen sea within us”—but it can still be as finely crafted as a Swiss watch. And an effective thriller is more than its premise or its plot. I doubt you could replace every sentence in a thriller with one that is semantically equivalent and have the resulting novel be as entertaining. This means that its sentences—and the small-scale choices they represent—help to determine the thriller’s effectiveness.

Many novelists have had the experience of being approached by someone convinced that they have a great idea for a novel, which they are willing to share in exchange for a fifty-fifty split of the proceeds. Such a person inadvertently reveals that they think formulating sentences is a nuisance rather than a fundamental part of storytelling in prose. Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art.

Of course, most pieces of writing, whether articles or reports or e-mails, do not come with the expectation that they embody thousands of choices. In such cases, is there any harm in automating the task? Let me offer another generalization: any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it. Effort during the writing process doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth reading, but worthwhile work cannot be made without it. The type of attention you pay when reading a personal e-mail is different from the type you pay when reading a business report, but in both cases it is only warranted when the writer put some thought into it.

Recently, Google aired a commercial during the Paris Olympics for Gemini, its competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4 . The ad shows a father using Gemini to compose a fan letter, which his daughter will send to an Olympic athlete who inspires her. Google pulled the commercial after widespread backlash from viewers; a media professor called it “one of the most disturbing commercials I’ve ever seen.” It’s notable that people reacted this way, even though artistic creativity wasn’t the attribute being supplanted. No one expects a child’s fan letter to an athlete to be extraordinary; if the young girl had written the letter herself, it would likely have been indistinguishable from countless others. The significance of a child’s fan letter—both to the child who writes it and to the athlete who receives it—comes from its being heartfelt rather than from its being eloquent.

Many of us have sent store-bought greeting cards, knowing that it will be clear to the recipient that we didn’t compose the words ourselves. We don’t copy the words from a Hallmark card in our own handwriting, because that would feel dishonest. The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copying.

Some have claimed that large language models are not laundering the texts they’re trained on but, rather, learning from them, in the same way that human writers learn from the books they’ve read. But a large language model is not a writer; it’s not even a user of language. Language is, by definition, a system of communication, and it requires an intention to communicate. Your phone’s auto-complete may offer good suggestions or bad ones, but in neither case is it trying to say anything to you or the person you’re texting. The fact that ChatGPT can generate coherent sentences invites us to imagine that it understands language in a way that your phone’s auto-complete does not, but it has no more intention to communicate.

It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.

Because language comes so easily to us, it’s easy to forget that it lies on top of these other experiences of subjective feeling and of wanting to communicate that feeling. We’re tempted to project those experiences onto a large language model when it emits coherent sentences, but to do so is to fall prey to mimicry; it’s the same phenomenon as when butterflies evolve large dark spots on their wings that can fool birds into thinking they’re predators with big eyes. There is a context in which the dark spots are sufficient; birds are less likely to eat a butterfly that has them, and the butterfly doesn’t really care why it’s not being eaten, as long as it gets to live. But there is a big difference between a butterfly and a predator that poses a threat to a bird.

A person using generative A.I. to help them write might claim that they are drawing inspiration from the texts the model was trained on, but I would again argue that this differs from what we usually mean when we say one writer draws inspiration from another. Consider a college student who turns in a paper that consists solely of a five-page quotation from a book, stating that this quotation conveys exactly what she wanted to say, better than she could say it herself. Even if the student is completely candid with the instructor about what she’s done, it’s not accurate to say that she is drawing inspiration from the book she’s citing. The fact that a large language model can reword the quotation enough that the source is unidentifiable doesn’t change the fundamental nature of what’s going on.

As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

Not all writing needs to be creative, or heartfelt, or even particularly good; sometimes it simply needs to exist. Such writing might support other goals, such as attracting views for advertising or satisfying bureaucratic requirements. When people are required to produce such text, we can hardly blame them for using whatever tools are available to accelerate the process. But is the world better off with more documents that have had minimal effort expended on them? It would be unrealistic to claim that if we refuse to use large language models, then the requirements to create low-quality text will disappear. However, I think it is inevitable that the more we use large language models to fulfill those requirements, the greater those requirements will eventually become. We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?

It’s not impossible that one day we will have computer programs that can do anything a human being can do, but, contrary to the claims of the companies promoting A.I., that is not something we’ll see in the next few years. Even in domains that have absolutely nothing to do with creativity, current A.I. programs have profound limitations that give us legitimate reasons to question whether they deserve to be called intelligent at all.

The computer scientist François Chollet has proposed the following distinction: skill is how well you perform at a task, while intelligence is how efficiently you gain new skills. I think this reflects our intuitions about human beings pretty well. Most people can learn a new skill given sufficient practice, but the faster the person picks up the skill, the more intelligent we think the person is. What’s interesting about this definition is that—unlike I.Q. tests—it’s also applicable to nonhuman entities; when a dog learns a new trick quickly, we consider that a sign of intelligence.

In 2019, researchers conducted an experiment in which they taught rats how to drive. They put the rats in little plastic containers with three copper-wire bars; when the mice put their paws on one of these bars, the container would either go forward, or turn left or turn right. The rats could see a plate of food on the other side of the room and tried to get their vehicles to go toward it. The researchers trained the rats for five minutes at a time, and after twenty-four practice sessions, the rats had become proficient at driving. Twenty-four trials were enough to master a task that no rat had likely ever encountered before in the evolutionary history of the species. I think that’s a good demonstration of intelligence.

Now consider the current A.I. programs that are widely acclaimed for their performance. AlphaZero, a program developed by Google’s DeepMind, plays chess better than any human player, but during its training it played forty-four million games, far more than any human can play in a lifetime. For it to master a new game, it will have to undergo a similarly enormous amount of training. By Chollet’s definition, programs like AlphaZero are highly skilled, but they aren’t particularly intelligent, because they aren’t efficient at gaining new skills. It is currently impossible to write a computer program capable of learning even a simple task in only twenty-four trials, if the programmer is not given information about the task beforehand.

Self-driving cars trained on millions of miles of driving can still crash into an overturned trailer truck, because such things are not commonly found in their training data, whereas humans taking their first driving class will know to stop. More than our ability to solve algebraic equations, our ability to cope with unfamiliar situations is a fundamental part of why we consider humans intelligent. Computers will not be able to replace humans until they acquire that type of competence, and that is still a long way off; for the time being, we’re just looking for jobs that can be done with turbocharged auto-complete.

Despite years of hype, the ability of generative A.I. to dramatically increase economic productivity remains theoretical. (Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs released a report titled “Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?”) The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.

Some individuals have defended large language models by saying that most of what human beings say or write isn’t particularly original. That is true, but it’s also irrelevant. When someone says “I’m sorry” to you, it doesn’t matter that other people have said sorry in the past; it doesn’t matter that “I’m sorry” is a string of text that is statistically unremarkable. If someone is being sincere, their apology is valuable and meaningful, even though apologies have previously been uttered. Likewise, when you tell someone that you’re happy to see them, you are saying something meaningful, even if it lacks novelty.

Something similar holds true for art. Whether you are creating a novel or a painting or a film, you are engaged in an act of communication between you and your audience. What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new. We are all products of what has come before us, but it’s by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world. That is something that an auto-complete algorithm can never do, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. ♦

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